LAND ART OF UTAH

September 30th – October 2nd, 2026

With the swirling energy of the world today, it feels necessary to pause to capture the stillness found in nature. Utah is home to a wide range of landscapes from the red rocks in southern Utah to the incredible mountains up north. There is also the impressive Colorado Plateau and the remarkable Great Salt Lake and the adjacent Great Basin Desert, which is actually more than 190,000 square miles and is located in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada.

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As we travel via air cross-country endless times, we will now make time to touch down to visit these pieces of America which are home to two important works of land art: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Each artist, life partners, was a major force in contemporary art and the land art movement as well as drawing upon other art disciplines to realize their visions.

SUN TUNNELS

Sun Tunnels is a work of art created by Nancy Holt in 1976. It consists of four massive concrete tunnels, each eighteen feet long and nine feet in diameter, laid out in the desert in an open X configuration. On the solstices, the tunnels frame the sun as it passes the horizon at sunrise and sunset. In the top of each tunnel, Holt drilled small holes to form the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba,and Capricorn. These holes, and the tunnels themselves, act as frames or lenses through which you can view the surrounding sky and landscape of the Great Basin Desert.

SPIRAL JETTY

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, located at Rozel Point on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake in Utah, is one of the most remarkable examples of Land art. In 1970, assisted by a crew operating dump trucks, a tractor, and a front loader, Smithson displaced some 6,000 tons of black basalt rock and earth from the adjacent shore to form a coil 1,500 feet long and approximately 15 feet wide, winding counterclockwise into the lake.

OUR GUIDE

We have the extraordinary good fortune to engage Hikmet Loe who has writtenextensively on each artist and the land art of the area. Hikmet fell in love with the Great Basin's deserts and the environs of Great Salt Lake. She is an author, curator,and educator whose work examines the changeable nature of the earth and addresses our perceptual and cultural constructs of the land. She draws inspiration from thesmaller patterns found in the larger environments of land, water, and sky.

She is the author of the award winning book The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson's Earthwork through Time and Place (2017), the first book in a new series devoted to our cultural and regional understanding of Land art from the 1960s and 1970s.

Hikkmet will be with us as we travel to and fro on each day and guide us to magical moments on site. If you are someone who has had these visits on your wish list for decades, as I have, this is a not to be missed time to come together and experience the magic of genius and set in nature.

Our Home Base - Hotel Monaco

We will be based in Salt Lake City and will travel via luxury transport - well provisioned - to each site in remote locations. Days will be long and I’m sure the visits and memories will compress time.

We will stay at the Hotel Monaco centrally located in downtown Salt Lake City. It is a full service hotel with a spa and gym. It is just a few blocks from the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art which we will visit on our arrival day.