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165 15 NATURAL/CULTURAL Alan Sonfist Considered a pioneer of public art that celebrates our links to the land, to permaculture, Alan Sonfist is an artist who has sought to bridge the great gap between humanity and nature by making us aware of the ancient, historic, and contemporary nature, geology, landforms, and living species that are part of “living history.” With a reawakening of public awareness of environmental issues and of a need to regenerate our living planet, Sonfist brings a much needed awareness of nature’s parallel and often unrecorded history and presence in contemporary life and art. As early as 1965 Sonfist advocated the building of monuments dedicated to the history of unpolluted air, and suggested that the migration of animals should be reported as public events. In an essay Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments, published in 1968, Sonfist emancipated public art from focusing exclusively on human history, stating: “As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings need to be remembered. Public art can be a reminder that the city was once a forest or a marsh.” Alan Sonfist continues to advocate, in his urban and rural artworks, projects that heighten our awareness of the historical geology or terrain of a place, earth cores become a symbol of the deeper history or geology of the land. His art emphasizes the layered and complex intertwining of human and natural history. He has bequeathed his body as an artwork to the Museum of Modern Art. Its decay is seen as an ongoing part of the natural life cycle process. Sonfist’s art has been exhibited internationally at Dokumenta VI (1977), TICKON in Denmark (1993), and in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978), the Los Angeles County Museum (1985), the Osaka World’s Fair (1988), Santa Fe Contemporary Art Center (1990), and the Museum of Natural History in Dallas, Texas (1994). Best known for his Natural/Cultural Landscape Commissions , which began in 1965 with Time Landscape  in New York City and Natural/Cultural 166 include Pool of Virgin Earth, Lewiston, New York (1973), Hemlock Forest, Bronx, New York (1978), Ten-Acre Project, Wave Hill, New York (1979), Geological Timeline, Duisburg, Germany (1986), the Rising Earth Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. (1990), Natural/Cultural Landscape, Trento, Italy (1993), and a seven-mile Sculpture Nature Trail in La Quinta, California (1998), as well as Natural/Cultural Landscapes created for the Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa, Florida (1995), and Aachen, Germany (1999). Sonfist has recently completed a one acre neolithic landscape titled The Lost Falcon near Koln, Germany and a fountain and stream reconstruction for a hospital in Pistoria, Italy. JG From the mid-1960s you established a name as one of the first environmental artists who, unlike land artists Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, did not emphasize a minimalist aesthetic in the creation of artworks and monuments. What do you feel brought you to environmental art? AS My art began in the street fires of the South Bronx, late 1950s, when I was a child. Gangs and packs of wild dogs were roaming the streets where I was growing up. The neighborhood was a landscape of concrete, no trees. The Bronx River divided the two major gangs, and the river protected a primal forest. It was my sanctuary as a child. The human violence didn’t enter the forest; it was my magical cathedral. I would skip school to spend every moment I could in this forest and replenish my energy, my life. The forest became my life, and my art. JG When you first turned your attention to artmaking, what inspiration did you draw from the art world? Were there certain artists or teachers who drew you in the direction you wanted or was it self-learning? AS It was self-directed. I have always been tuned to collecting and gathering fragments of the forest. Labeling it as “art” or “not art” was never an issue. It was more the uniqueness of these elements that attracted me. Even when I went to school in the midwest, later, I brought with me some of the seedlings of my Bronx forest after it was destroyed by an intentional fire. JG As early as 1965 you produced a work called Time Landscape involving actual living growth in...

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