Robert Smithson was a seminal American artist and writer known for pioneering the Land Art movement. His monumental earthen sculptures such as Spiral Jetty (1970), were inspired by the Minimalist work of his contemporaries, as well as geology, science fiction, and the concept of entropy. “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum,” he once mused. “Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.” Born on January 2, 1938 in Passaic, NJ, he briefly studied at the Art Students League in New York, where he began producing collages and paintings in the style of the Abstract Expressionists David Smith and Jackson Pollock. During...