Having its origin in the 1960s, Land Art--also known as Earth Art, Earthworks, or Environmental Art--is a largely sculpture-based movement in which physical or conceptual elements of a natural landscape are integrated into the finished work. Often these pieces are characterized by their monumental scale and outdoor setting, drawing the user out of the traditional gallery or museum space (and by association, the commercial sphere). However, artists associated with Land Art also create work that be displayed in a commercial setting, either through photography, installation pieces, or other mediums. Driven by a preoccupation with scientific phenomena and a sensitivity to the natural world, Land Art--a movement populated mainly by male artists--found its origins in such diverse influences as the "social sculptures" of Joseph Beuys and mystical ancient monuments like Stonehenge and the Native American "Serpent Mound" in Ohio. An early show that brought the movement to prominence was "Earthworks," a 1968 group exhibition at New York's Dwan Gallery that featured Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Carl Andre, Herbert Bayer, Stephen Kaltenbach, Claes Oldenburg, and Sol LeWitt.

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Considering Land Art, with its ambition, stripped-down impact, and deep, guttural communication, can be a bracing corrective whenever contemporary art gets too academic or glitzy. In this month's Land Art map, we've pinpointed the locations of major works all over the United States, from iconic sites like Robert Smithson's Spiral Getty and Michael Heizer's City to newcomers like Maya Lin's Wave Field. For those interested in exploring this movement, which has its origins in the crosscurrents of Minimalism and the get-back-to-nature zeitgeist of the 1960s, we suggest making a weekend pilgrimage to a nearby earthwork and experiencing it firsthand. But a taste of Land Art can also be found in New York City this month, where PaceWildenstein is premiering "Three Ways of Looking at the Earth" by Maya Lin--who also designed the Museum of Chinese in America, opening in its new downtown location on the 22nd--and Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room will reopen mid-month at Dia's Wooster Street space.

• ArtWeLove's Land Art Map
• PaceWildenstein: Maya Lin
• Dia: New York Earth Room

If you're looking for a dose of uplift this month, New York's major museums have got you covered. Topping the list of crowd-pleasers opening in September is "Monet's Water Lilies," an exhibition at MoMA showcasing masterworks from the artist's beloved series. At the Whitney, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" will survey the Feminist icon's sensual, lesser-known abstract paintings. The Guggenheim, meanwhile, will pull out all the stops for a megawatt Vasily Kandinsky  retrospective, bringing together the mystical artist's most important works from around the world. As a respite from all this colorful abstraction, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting forth "The Americans,"  photographer Robert Frank's legendary black-and-white portrait of the United States in the 1950s; exhibitions of Vermeer's The Milkmaid and the work of French Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau will round out the season's offerings at the museum. If you're looking for challenging contemporary art, though, never fear: MoMA is also showing über-intellectual multimedia artist Paul Sietsema, Dia has artist/litterateur Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and SculptureCenter is debuting an unmissable collaboration by subversive icons Mike Kelley and Michael Smith.

• MoMA: Monet's Water Lilies
• Whitney: Georgia O'Keeffe
• Guggenheim: Kandinsky
• Met: Vermeer
• Met: Robert Frank
• Met: Watteau
• MoMA: Paul Sietsema
• Dia: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
• SculptureCenter: Mike Kelley and Michael Smith

"Go big or go home" is usually the mantra for gallery shows in September, but this time New York's art dealers have added a twist: instead of displaying the usual new work by marquee artists, a number of galleries are bringing out exciting, unexpected wares. Some of these shows involve major artists working outside their traditional mediums. Gagosian, for instance, is showing bronze sculptures by Cy Twombly, an artist best known as perhaps the greatest living painter (the dealer will be saving the paintings for the debut of his new Athens gallery later this month); Zwirner is showing minimalist graphite drawings by the dazzling painter and sculptor Chris Ofili; and Deitch will display a series of hip-hop-inspired photographs by noted painter Kehinde Wiley. Gavin Brown, meanwhile, is branching out from his all-star lineup to show work by three young, unknown European artists; James Cohan Gallery will show work by a new generation of fictitious (and provocatively cliché) Middle Eastern artists, wholly invented by Chinese art prankster Xu Zhen; and Greene Naftali will host the mysterious artist/dealer/imaginary-friend collective the Bernadette Corporation. In this same experimental frame of mind, Christie's and Sotheby's are both leading off the contemporary-art auction season with sales of little-known works by hot artists. But if you want to see something more straightforward, in-demand photographers Jeff Wall and Juergen Teller are showing at Marian Goodman and Lehmann Maupin, respectively, and magpie-pleasing artist Anselm Reyle is bringing his shiny, colorful works to Gagosian. All told, it should be an interesting--and, for market-watchers, suspenseful--September.

• Gagosian: Cy Twombly
• David Zwirner: Chris Ofili
• Deitch: Kehinde Wiley
• Gavin Brown: Ida Ekblad, Alistair Frost, and David Hominal
• James Cohan: Xu Zhen
• Greene Naftali: Bernadette Corporation
• Marian Goodman: Jeff Wall
• Lehmann Maupin: Juergen Teller
• Gagosian: Anselm Reyle
• Christie's: First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art
  
• Sotheby's: Contemporary Art

Robert Smithson was a seminal figure in the Land Art movement through the 1960s and 1970s, though his immensely influential body of work also extends into writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Best known for Spiral Jetty, his 1970 "earthwork" in the Great Salt Lake, Smithson made art using such unconventional materials as dump trucks, mirrors, maps, and quarries--all with the aim of transporting viewers, literally or figuratively, outside the gallery and museum space, which he considered "jails" and "tombs" inadequate for conveying the messy nature of reality. Born in 1938 in Passaic, New Jersey, Smithson dropped out of high school to accept a scholarship at the Arts Students League in New York, where he began making expressionistic paintings that often featured religious or totemic themes.

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A mythic figure in the Land Art movement, Michael Heizer has built some of the largest and most ambitious pieces in recent history, and has spent the past three decades working on what some consider to be among the boldest artworks of all time. Heizer's work, which like most of Land Art finds its roots in Minimalism, was among the first to challenge the institutional boundaries of galleries and museums in the 1960s, creating a modern approach to art that used the environment as both medium and subject. As an artist who has worked primarily in the American west, Heizer has aspired to create heroic art that evokes both the permanence and impermanence of ancient monuments. “Part of my art is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear age," Heizer once said. "We’re probably living at the end of civilization.”

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Maya Lin is an American artist and architect who rose to international prominence when in 1981, during her senior year at Yale University, her proposed design for the Vietnam War Memorial was accepted out of 1400 submissions. The memorial consists of two enormous black granite slabs slicing as a wedge into the Washington Mall, with the names of the war dead engraved chronologically on the stone. The piece--highly controversial at the time for suggesting neither a victory nor a defeat but simply a scar descending into the earth--has influenced a generation of architects and artists. Since then, Lin has continued to make powerful work in a variety of fields, from architecture and site-specific installation to drawing and sculpture, often exploring human interactions with nature.

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A sculptor and composer, Walter De Maria is best known for his pioneering work as part of the Land Art movement--particularly The Lightning Field, a massive sculpture that he erected in the New Mexico desert in 1977. De Maria was born in California and studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley, then in 1960 came to New York to join the city's art scene, where he befriended the Minimalist artist Robert Morris. Throughout the 1960s the two artists worked with industrial materials, largely machine-honed metals and woods, creating pure, Minimalist pieces that displayed the influence of the Dada movement and avant-garde artists of the time, including Marcel Duchamp. De Maria also achieved some success as a musician, recording two albums, "Cricket Music" (1964) and "Ocean Music" (1968), as well as briefly being installed in 1965 as the drummer for the legendary pop band/Warholian experiment, the Velvet Underground.

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Alice Aycock is an American sculptor known for theoretically complex site-specific works that are at once emotional and architectural, mining diverse sources of inspiration ranging from the environmental preoccupations of Land Art to popular forms of entertainment (amusement parks in particular), obscure literary sources, and sci-fi elements. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Aycock received her M.A. in 1971 from Hunter College in New York, where she studied with the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. Aycock's father, a construction engineer, was another influence on her work, as was Donald Judd, Conceptual Art, and post-Modernism. “For me,” Aycock once said, “art is a conversation that artists have with other artists.”

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Hans Haacke is a German-American conceptual artist whose controversial works expose the interconnectivity of culture, politics, corruption, and greed. Spanning a range of mediums and drawing upon a variety of contemporary art strategies, from Conceptualism to Land Art, Haacke’s muckraking work often throws back the curtain on the culture industry, probing the shady dealings of museum trustees or other officials who control what is promoted and displayed. As a result of his work, Haacke--who has said he intends his art to "convict" its subject--is regarded as a forefather of an artistic approach known as institutional critique.

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“I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.” Through the past thirty some years, American artist, James Turrell, has created work that manipulates light and space, eschewing objects or images, to heighten the viewer's perception to a new level. The artist's work explores ways of using light to bring a consciousness to the space, the feeling of "see[ing] yourself see." Turrell's best known, yet-unfinished piece is located at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Since 1974, Turrell has been working to make Roden Crater into a massive observatory where audiences can have a venue honed to enhance the observation of the phenomenal movement of natural light and for watching celestial events with the naked eye.

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