Tuesday Texts: Chapter Six

Digital Programs

drawing by Robert Smithson showing wandering earth mounds and gravel paths

Our Scholarly Text Program commissions and publishes new writing on single artworks by Holt and/or Smithson, which are then shared digitally through Tuesday Texts. Each Chapter of Tuesday Texts is published through a weekly announcement on Holt/Smithson Foundation's website and social media.

Chapter Six of Tuesday Texts will take place throughout January of 2024. Each essay in the series will focus on an aspect of Robert Smithson's work.

Chapter Six

Trey Burns, "Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport Project, 1966-67"

Teresa Hantke, "Second Stage Injector"

Sean J Patrick Carney, "Florida, Man: Robert Smithson’s Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria"

Related Content

drawing by Robert Smithson showing wandering earth mounds and gravel paths

Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport Project, 1966-67

Trey Burns
January 2024
Robert Smithson consulted with the engineering and architectural firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS) from 1966 to 1967 on the design of Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport (DFW). This opportunity was spurred by a panel discussion featuring Smithson titled “Shaping the Environment: The Artist and the City” at Yale University in 1966.
a collage made by robert smithson showing an advertisement in the center titled "Second Stage Injector"

Second Stage Injector

Teresa Hantke
January 2024
Robert Smithson is known for large scale land art pieces, in which center and periphery play an important role on the spatial level. He repeatedly quoted the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s statement “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” in his essays. His interest in “fringes” serves as a thematic continuum throughout his entire body of work, which also includes a series of collages and drawings created between 1963 and 1964.
a white sand beach with a pile of sea shells arranged into a long round oval shape. blue sky and ocean in the background

Florida, Man: Robert Smithson’s Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria

Sean J Patrick Carney
January 2024

Before sunrise on an already soupy Monday in mid-August 2023, scores of white contractor pickups from mainland Florida clogged the causeway bridge onto Sanibel, a narrow, crescent barrier island curving twelve miles along the Sunshine State’s southwestern Gulf Coast. Ten months earlier, Hurricane Ian had thrashed the island, leveling homes and businesses, disemboweling infrastructure, and clobbering complex, verdant ecosystems filled with alligators, marsh rabbits, black racer snakes, river otters, iguanas, gopher tortoises, and legions of bird species.