The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that as a well-known sculptor and earthworker Smithson obscured from others’ awareness. These include family trauma; his substantial history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, alchemy, astrology, and numerology; and his sexual fluidity.

Author Suzaan Boettger, an art historian and critic in New York City, will discuss those elements as displayed in his expressive paintings made in the early 1960s, the period in which his subject matter went “underground” as he did, professionally, before emerging in 1965 as a cerebral sculptor and essayist. Dr. Boettger will answer questions about how her investigative art history process led her to expanding Smithson’s personal, professional, and sexual identities.

Copies of the book will be available for sale thanks to our friends at Oblong Books. 

About the Speaker

Suzaan Boettger, a widely published scholar, arts journalist, and critic based in New York City, is the author of Earthworks: Art and Landscape of the Sixties. She is professor emerita of the history of art at Bergen Community College. 

Image credit: Robert Smithson, Buried Angel, 1962. Oil/canvas, 49 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches. Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah.  Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.