Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson was an American artist and writer from Passaic, New Jersey and a founder of Land Art. His best-known work, Spiral Jetty of 1970, is a coil of black basalt and earth running out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. He also made non-sites, gallery works pairing rocks from a place with maps and photographs, and wrote influential essays on entropy and landscape. He died in a plane crash while surveying Amarillo Ramp in Texas, and his wife Nancy Holt completed it.