Spanning from his early drawings, larger-than-life land art installations, poetry, and table sketches, Jim Denevan highlights the dynamic, ephemeral nature of the artist’s work and play. Denevan’s rakes, sticks, and other tools will be showcased alongside photographic and film projections of his work. Personal items and nostalgia such as his iconic cowboy boots, cowboy hat collection, and a miniature Outstanding in the Field red bus will also be on display.
Jim Denevan is a world-renowned American artist. In 1999, he founded Outstanding in the Field, a radical reconceptualization of the dining experience at the forefront of the sustainability movement that has gained global cult status. Denevan interacts with the earth’s topography to create entirely site-specific works in sand, earth, and ice, which can span miles. Ephemeral in nature, the near meditative practice is the purpose for Denevan, who relying on intuition and parallax over measurement aids, creates mathematically and geometrically complex compositions and leaves them prone to the tides, winds and seasonal progressions. Unexpectedly confronted with the works in a natural setting, viewers are invited to interact with art beyond institutional walls. Denevan has been commissioned to create land drawings across the world, including for Desert X AlUla in 2022, and documentation of his work has been featured in the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale,Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, Christie's and MoMA/PS1. He was the subject of the recent documentary, Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan by Patrick Trefz. An avid surfer, Denevan is from Santa Cruz, California.