Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak, Alan Sonfist

Artwork Overview

Alan Sonfist, Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak
Alan Sonfist, Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak
Alan Sonfist
Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak
1969
Landscape of the Earth of the White Oak, 1969
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: lampblack; canvas; beeswax; resin
Dimensions:
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 183 x 445 cm
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 72 1/16 x 175 3/16 in
Credit line: Gift of Herbert and Paula Molner
Accession number: 1997.0353
Not on display
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Label texts

Archive Label 2003: This work is part of a series of rubbings that environmental sculptor Alan Sonfist executed between 1969 and 1975. The unstretched canvas was spread over the ground below an oak tree. The marks made from the rubbing map the earth and the tree’s roots. Oak trees hold particular significance for Sonfist. They provided him refuge as a child growing up in the south-central Bronx of New York City, where there was a virgin forest that has now been destroyed. Serving as a microcosm of the artist’s central concerns for ecology and the fragility of nature, this work demonstrates Sonfist’s ongoing documentation of repressed or forgotten histories, of trees as well as cities. The scope of his thinking is far-reaching and often large in scale, to include the environmental evolution of urban landscapes.