One of Utah’s largest and best-known works of art has received a new national recognition — thanks to a Utah State University graduate student’s thesis project.
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt rock on the northeast edge of the Great Salt Lake, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The designation was announced Tuesday by the Dia Art Foundation, the New York-based art nonprofit that owns the jetty and advocates for its legacy.
Applying to put Spiral Jetty on the register was a project by Amy Reid, a graduate student at USU working toward her master’s degree in landscape architecture.
Reid said her interest in Spiral Jetty came when she started studying the Great Salt Lake.
“I started thinking, ‘Where do people go today to connect with the lake?’,” she said. “I really came to this nomination wanting to do something positive for the lake, and wanting to celebrate places where people can go to connect with that astounding beauty and [this] really unique feature that we have right here.”
So Reid — who left a career in sales and marketing to pursue landscape architecture, in what she called “one of those midlife assessments” — proposed to her advisers at Utah State that the application for the register could be her master’s thesis.
USU, she said, has a thesis program called Plan B, “where we can do, basically, a project.” Her advisers approved.
‘I wanted to do it right’
Reid said her first step was connecting with the organizations responsible for Spiral Jetty. That included the Dia Art Foundation, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which represents the estates of Smithson and his wife and collaborator, artist Nancy Holt.
Holt and Smithson’s estate donated Spiral Jetty to the foundation in 1999. Dia Art Foundation oversees stewardship of the jetty, working with UMFA and the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster University.
“It took several months of work, just connecting with all the partners and getting to talk to them, explain the process and answer questions,” she said. “I wanted to do it right, and make sure no one was surprised with the designation.” (One of the criteria of being put on the historic register is permission from the location’s owners.)
Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzberg Director, said in a statement that the designation “will help us spread awareness of the iconic artwork and advocate for its long-term preservation.”
Reid said she first learned of Spiral Jetty before she moved to Utah 15 years ago, from her sister, who had been studying art history at the University of California in Berkeley. It was 2002, shortly after the waters of the Great Salt Lake had receded and revealed the jetty for the first time in years.
Her sister, Reid said, “made a special pilgrimage. … I remembered her doing that, and thought, ‘Wow, you’re going all the way out to Utah, then renting a car and then driving a couple hours to go see some rocks, essentially.’ … So I knew it had to be pretty special for her to make that effort, as an art history student.”
It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic, long after she had moved to Utah, that Reid visited the jetty. “Like many of us, we were looking, during lockdown, for somewhere we could go that was safe for our families,” she said.
On that first visit, she said, many other people had the same idea, and the parking lot and the road leading to it were packed. On later visits, she said she experienced it alone — which is how Smithson intended it.
”He didn’t like things that were perfect, in terms of the landscape,” Reid said. “He liked some grit and that there’s, like, this pull between the beauty of it … and the decay, almost. He called it a ‘dialectic’ between man and nature.”
Before the application to put Spiral Jetty on the register was approved, Reid’s work had already been a success: She defended her thesis in May, and this summer received her master’s degree.
A rare exception
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Great Salt Lake as seen near the Spiral Jetty, Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021.
Hikmet Sidney Loe, a Utah author and art historian who published “The Spiral Jetty Encyclo” in 2017, said that sites usually must be at least 50 years old to qualify for the national register.
Spiral Jetty is one of the first works from the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s to make the list, “paving the way for more works to be added,” she said Wednesday.
Loe, a visiting assistant professor in art history at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said the designation also will help people studying the jetty — because the documents required to apply for the register “provide excellent opportunities for accurate and verified research.”
Smithson built Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point, jutting from the shore at the northeast corner of the Great Salt Lake, in 1970. Two years later, the lake’s waters rose and the jetty disappeared, resurfacing in 1980 and quickly covered up again. It reappeared in 1993, briefly was covered again in 1997, and since then has been visible.
As the lake level has decreased, UMFA executive director Gretchen Dietrich said, the jetty sometimes sits nearly a mile from the water, depending on the season. To many, it has become a barometer of the lake’s health.
“It’s still there, doing its thing,” Dietrich said. “So much has changed around it in these 54 years. And it’s both terrifying and reassuring to think about the changes that are going to come.”
Smithson died in 1973, at age 35, in a small-plane crash while surveying a site for an earthwork near Amarillo, Texas. Holt continued creating art and promoting the Land Art movement until her death in 2014. Her best-known work is Sun Tunnels, created shortly after Smithson’s death — a collection of concrete tubes at a site in the desert in Box Elder County, positioned to align with the rising and setting sun at the winter and summer solstices.
Getting a site on the National Register of Historic Places is often part of a drive to preserve the location; the addition of Abravanel Hall to the list in November is an example. Putting Spiral Jetty on the register raises a question: Would Smithson approve?
Smithson, Dietrich said, “was interested in entropy. He was interested in the way things fall apart. And what is so interesting is that the jetty is very much about time. It’s about geologic time. It’s about the present time, and it’s about the future.”
Reid said the application for the register doesn’t advocate for “any interventions to the jetty.”
“That is not the point of it. It really is to provide a formal record of this site in a way that has not been done before,” she said. “For history, for the record, we now have a very complete view of the landscape, the natural forces, the man-made impacts on the landscape — all these things that influenced Smithson to choose this site.”
