The University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts will welcome Alan Sonfist to campus October 13-19 with a reception Thursday, October 13 at 5 p.m. at the Dudley Recital Hall, 4800 Calhoun Road, and an artist talk to follow at 6 p.m.

Alan Sonfist, one of the pioneers of the Land Art movement, will be working with artists, scientists, and students to create a new series of paintings, “Earth of Houston” that characterize the unique qualities of Houston’s earth. Each painting will represent the special properties of Texas’ earth. The earth painting series began in 1970 where Sonfist first showed them in a Corcoran Art Gallery show, “Earth Paintings.” “Earth of Houston” will be shown on the UH campus this fall.

Natural resources such as soil, seed, leaves, and branches are rudimental components in Sonfist’s work. Earth elements have been incorporated in numerous projects including “Gene Bank of New York,” “Earth Paintings of the World” (1970), and “Pool of Virgin Earth” (1975).

The large-scale initiatives are a testament to the artist’s unwavering determination to memorialize the life and death of the earth. To continue his quest for ecological sustainability, Sonfist has proposed to create a time capsule with the soils of the world. He is requesting people across the globe to send samples of soil uncontaminated by human interference from their area, which will be placed in a time capsule for future generations.

The project does not intend to preserve the soils, but rather to memorialize the earth and showcase Sonfist’s message that our planet is in the midst of an environmental pandemic. In a 1969 lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Sonfist said, “Public monuments traditionally celebrated events in human history—acts of heroism important to the human community. Increasingly, as we come to understand our dependence on nature, the concept of community expands to include non-human elements. Civic monuments, then, should honor and celebrate the life and acts of the total community, the human ecosystem, including natural phenomena. Especially within the city, public monuments should recapture and revitalize the history of the natural environment at that location. As in war monuments, that record of life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings needs to be remembered.”

Sonfist has been a featured speaker and lecturer in numerous symposiums at major institutions and conferences including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Midwest College Association, the U.N. Ecological Conference in São Paulo, the Berlin Ecology Conference, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago.

For more information, visit https://alansonfiststudio.com