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Smithson’s dating of this woodcut indicates that he produced it around the time of his Elizabeth Carstairs Scholarship from the Art Students League. Collection Richard Castellane. Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.
Suzaan Boettger's lecture will focus on Robert Smithson’s little-known drawings made from 1955 while a student at the Art Students League and those of the ensuing years to 1964 before becoming a well-known essayist, sculptor, and land artist. She will discuss and illustrate several works never-before-exhibited, analyzed in print, and/or known to exist. These include his expressive realist imagery, his visions of angels both lithe and hunky, his “cartouche” collage/drawings mixing the overt sexuality of mid-20th century pin-up “broads”, and his tracings of muscular beefcakes illustrated in bodybuilding magazines retroactively described as a “semi-illicit form of soft-core gay erotica.”
Bring your copy of Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson to be inscribed or purchase one after the lecture.
This talk will take place in-person only and will not be recorded.
Suzaan Boettger is an art historian and critic in New York City. Dr. Boettger is the author of the contextualized history of the onset of the land art movement, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties; Nedko Solakov: Ninety-Nine Fears; and most recently, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson. This first biography expands Smithson’s reputation beyond his fame as an essayist both polemical and fantastical and the creator of the magisterial Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Inside the Spiral discloses the extent of Smithson’s formerly unknown early career as a figurative painter following study at the Art Students League. Acclaimed as "definitive, particularly in its investigation of the artist’s unconscious as well as conscious motives," Inside the Spiral radically alters Smithsons’s art historical, personal, and sexual identities, revealing Smithson and his work to be more fascinating than anyone imagined. www.suzaanboettger.net
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