Artist Talk | Richard Long
In this special conversation at the YCBA, acclaimed British artist Richard Long talks about his installation, Gravity, a site-specific work conceived for the YCBA’s Entrance Court, with James Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art.
About this program
Long, the renowned British land artist, will be in conversation with Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to discuss his YCBA installation, his career and artistic practice, and more.
About the speaker
Richard Long has been in the vanguard of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking over half a century ago in 1967, while still a student. This photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. Through this medium of walking, time, space, and distance became new subjects for his art. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world, including a walk in the Alps that was documented by his first text work for the seminal exhibition of minimal and conceptual works titled When Attitude Becomes Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. After 1969, he began making journeys and sculptures in wilderness places all around the world.
In the 1980s, Long began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints, or stone, often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites. Long mediates on his experience of these places, from mountains through to deserts, shorelines, grasslands, rivers, and snowscapes, according to archetypal geometric marks and shapes, made by his footsteps alone or gathered from the materials of the place. These walks and temporary works of passage are recorded with photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names, and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.
Long was born in Bristol, UK, in 1945 and he lives and works between London and Bristol. He studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol (1962–65), then St Martin’s School of Art, London (1966–68).
Major solo exhibitions include Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2023); M Leuven, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Chateau La Coste, Provence, France (2021); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2019); Fondation CAB, Brussels, Belgium (2018); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2017); Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2015); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010); Tate Britain, London, UK (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK (2007); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA (2006); National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (1996); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA (1994); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (1986).
Long represented Britain at the 37th Venice Biennale (1976) and won the Turner Prize (1989). He received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture (1990), has been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2001), and was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in the field of sculpture (2009). In addition, he has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2013) and was knighted in the 2018 Honours List.
About the moderator
James Meyer is curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He was previously chief curator and deputy director at Dia Art Foundation and the Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University. Author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) and The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2019), and editor of several books, he has curated solo presentations of the art of Mel Bochner, Anne Truitt, Robert Morris, and Kerry James Marshall, and the exhibitions Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971 (2016) and The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 (2022) at the National Gallery of Art. He is currently curating an episodic history of American art from the Gilded Age until the present for the National Gallery of Victoria opening in Melbourne in June 2027.
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Richard Long: Gravity is presented with generous support from the Bukhman Foundation.
Image credit
Richard Long, 2017 © The Artist; Courtesy, Lisson. Photograph by Jack Hems.
