“CITY”, A MONUMENTAL ARTWORK AND CULTURAL RESOURCE
LOCATED IN GARDEN VALLEY, NEVADA
Created by Renowned Artist Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer's City project located in Garden Valley, Nevada, is one of the most significant
artworks ever created in the United States. After 43 years, and with considerable organizational
support from museums across the country including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
The Menil Collection in Houston, and the Dia Art Foundation in New York, this monumental
work is in it’s final stage of completion.
The mile-and-a-half long City complex is composed of abstract sculptural, architecturally sized
forms made of compacted earth and concrete that are reminiscent in shape, scale, and ambition
of ancient ceremonial cities, as well as reflecting the most modern building technologies. With
its timeless, awe-inspiring forms, Heizer’s City will stand as one of the most remarkable and
famous American monuments of our time. City has drawn interest from museums across the
United States, in addition to universities and institutions involved in culture and the arts. The
project has also been the subject of coverage in prominent media outlets like the The New York
Times.
Heizer chose the site for its remote location, severe beauty, profound silence and its naturally
available materials. The area’s pervasive quiet conjoins with the masterpiece’s shaped mounds
and carved out negative spaces to create a monumental complex that fuses ancient and modern
associations. Museums, foundations, and private philanthropists have helped to purchase parcels
of land around the sculpture in an ongoing effort to preserve Coal and Garden Valleys and to
safeguard the area’s isolated environment among the surrounding federal lands.
To date, over $25 million has been spent to build City, which has inspired support from
numerous philanthropic foundations and individuals. A considerable portion of that money has
been used to purchase local materials for construction and to pay the salaries of workers. The
project has funneled over $10 million into both Lincoln and Nye Counties in the past 10 years
alone. Once finished, the sculpture will continue to have a positive impact on the local economy
by drawing visitors from around the globe.
Michael Heizer’s other monumental sculpture in Nevada is Double Negative. This work and his
early collaborations with Walter De Maria inspired the use of the American landscape by other
artists that resulted in a series of epic-scale works in the western part of the United States artists
including, Robert Morris, Charles Ross, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell. Walter De Maria's
1977 Lightning Field in New Mexico graces the cover of Robert Hughes’ survey of American art
titled “American Visions.”
Most recently, Heizer’s Levitated Mass sculpture has drawn global attention. The 456 foot-long
sculpture in the center of Los Angeles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art features a
340-ton, granite boulder that was transported 105 miles by a 300-foot, custom built, heavy haul
carrier. During the course of its ten day move, as the boulder went through four counties and
twenty-two cities, it attracted over 100,000 people who came to see it. At 340 tons, the boulder
was one of the largest megaliths moved since ancient times. The sculpture has drawn hundreds of
thousands of visitors.
Artist Biography
Michael Heizer was born in Berkeley, California, in 1944. He briefly attended the San Francisco
Art Institute and moved to New York City in 1966, where he produced large-scale paintings.
In the late 1968-69, Heizer chose to operate between his studios in New York and a ranch
he eventually built in Nevada. Here, he began to produce large-scale sculptures such as Nine
Nevada Depressions and Displaced/Replaced Mass, as well as large earth drawings and dye
paintings on dry lakes in California and Nevada. His 1969 artwork Double Negative (now owned
by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) inspired generations of artists. Heizer is
currently completing his largest project, City, begun in 1972. Permanent installations of Heizer’s
sculpture can be found throughout the United States, including Seattle, Washington; Oakland
and Los Angeles, California; the Menil Collection and Rice University in Houston, Texas; the
MIT campus in Boston, Massachusetts, the corner of 56th and Madison Avenue in New York
City and Buffalo Rock State Park, Illinois. Major exhibitions of his work have been presented at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
Foundazione Prada, Milan, Italy, and at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Holland.
Heizer’s maternal grandfather, Olaf P. Jenkins, was Chief of the California Division of Mines;
his paternal grandfather, Ott F. Heizer, was a mining engineer who was the General Manager
of the Nevada-Massachusetts Co. tungsten mine in Nevada. His father, Robert F. Heizer, was a
prominent archaeologist and anthropologist. Among Robert F. Heizer’s best-known works were
his studies of the Native American Indian cultures of California and Nevada and his excavation
of the Olmec culture at the La Venta site in Tabasco, where he and others unearthed ceremonial
complexes and discovered stone monuments related to those recently on view at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art.