Occupying Space: Land art and the Red Power Movement, c. 1965-78

Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place

Abstract

Scholars of Land art have long acknowledged the influence of pre-Columbian Indigenous art on earthworks made in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, identifying this appropriation as an extension of modernism’s preoccupation with “primitivism”. Less attention has been paid to the temporal and ideological parallels between Land art and the Red Power movement – a historic moment in Indigenous American rights activism that comprised a series of highly publicised protests and land occupations at sites like Alcatraz Island, Wounded Knee, and Mount Rushmore. As this wave of activism intensified and brought issues of land ownership and the legacy of settler colonialism to the forefront of the American public’s concerns, a number of non-Native artists began working with land as their primary material. By situating a selection of works by artists Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim within the historical framework of Red Power – including media representations of activists and countercultural appropriations of Indigenous American traditions – another social lens emerges through which to interpret these iconic works of Land art. The issues of displacement, territorial borders, and trespassing that emerge in Heizer’s and Oppenheim’s works take on new meaning when considered in relation to Red Power activists’ interrogation of broken historic treaties and demands for the return of stolen lands.