Complete Terra Firma Program (pdf)

This program focused on the visual arts and related fields in the exploration of land based issues and projects: earthworks, environmental and conservation works, landscape painting and photography, landscape architecture.

One of the fundamental commonalities for artists, writers, scientists and the general public is the powerful, omnipresent reality of the land. How we interact with it, value it, use it, care for it, vision it and represent it is the basis of “Terra Firma: Common Ground.” Creating a greater awareness of our responsibility to and for the land is our ultimate goal.

Artists' images of the land, from prehistoric times to today, have created a lexicon of human perception serving as reference for artists, scientists and historians. Landscape images (whether on cave wall, canvas, panel or in three dimensions) have presented both objective and subjective information about our mastery of and relationship to the land.

We will be presenting broad based, multidisciplinary programs that will present the arts alone and in their relationships with other disciplines in the exploration of our place in the land. This multi-layered approach to the subject will offer a variety of access paths for the community to engage in the programs. Collaborative public programs will include lectures and demonstrations on ecology, conservation, land utilization, art history, native ceramic practices, adobe construction, earthworks and music and literature.

By inviting artists of stature and experience whose work addresses the earth, we will bring to Santa Fe a wide variety of aesthetic and stylistic approaches to an arena of pressing interest to artists, humanists, scientists and the general public.