It’s the largest piece of contemporary art ever created, and it sits more than three hours north of Las Vegas. It’s simply titled City: a land art project spanning more than 700,000 acres in Garden Valley.
It took creator Michael Heizer — also the creator of the Double Negative land art piece in the Moapa Valley, as well as Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — 50 years to complete it.
In 2022, it welcomed its first visitors, though visitation is not easy. Securing reservations on days when the installation is open is very difficult. Only six people can visit it at a time.
And after that 2022 opening, lots of people asked a lot of questions: Is creating art designed to recontextualize the land a slap in the face to the area’s Indigenous population? Is City yet another example of hubris and grandiosity in Southern Nevada? And what kind of city is City?
Journalist Meg Bernhard had an additional question she wanted answered on her visit — what is land art’s relationship to its environment?
Guest: Meg Bernhard, freelance reporter, Desert Companion
