As a child Robert Smithson created a personal museum of natural history in the basement of his family home. This early interest in science, geography, and museums influenced many of Smithson’s artworks throughout his life. Between 1961 and 1963, Smithson created a series of collages showing evolving amphibians and dinosaurs, developing out of this childhood interest in natural history museums. Algae, algae combines collage turtles with the use of language as a visual tool, its accumulation of text suggesting the movement of the sea's dark green waves.

Featured among similarly religious works in one of Smithson’s first solo shows, ​Feet of Christ foreshadows the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with spirals. In this drawing, the stigmata are depicted as whirlpools of flesh and blood, their centers aligned like the empty eye holes of a mask. For Smithson, the spiral is an endless quest for completion, the geometry of which defies tangible fulfillment. The wounds in ​Feet of Christ ​are the symbolic end of man’s search for God—yet their meandering shapes render certainty elusive.