Photo: Sara Messinger
A Land Artist Asks: What Will Be Left When I’m Not Here?
Meg Webster creates works that are often fleeting. At 82, with a new show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, now she’s looking for a place in history.
By Julia Halperin, Visuals by Sara Messinger
You can hear and smell Meg Webster’s latest exhibition before you see it.
Walking up the stairs of Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, there’s a chorus of birds chirps. Then comes the smell: a dusky, dense scent reminiscent of wet earth. Finally, you walk into the main space and encounter “Thicket,” the show’s titular artwork, a beckoning spiral made of local branches, leaves and flowers.
As visitors to the gallery make their way inside the installation, the bushy walls ascend, swallowing them up. (Once inside, the birds are still audible: it’s a sound artwork called “Nearest Virgin Forest,” which was recorded under Webster’s direction in Hutcheson Memorial Forest in New Jersey, an hour’s drive from New York City.)
The show is her first solo exhibition at Paula Cooper in a decade. It arrives amid growing interest in Webster, an 82-year-old environmental artist who has spent her career staunchly committed to the kind of subtle, ephemeral art that makes it nearly impossible to become rich or famous. Her best-known sculptures include “Wall of Wax” (1990), an eight-foot-tall curved wall of beeswax, and “Moss Bed, King” (1986-88), a low, moss-covered form the size of a king mattress. At the end of every exhibition, she destroys her installations and recycles or returns the materials to nature.
Webster brings the natural world into art spaces at a moment when the iPhone-attached masses have rarely felt more alienated from the outdoors. “We’re in a place in our country where people are afraid of nature,” Webster said, when we met at Paula Cooper ahead of the opening. “They know it’s beautiful when they’re at a waterfall, but they’re afraid of bugs and snakes.”
It does not help that, amid climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, nature feels more like a destructive force than a nurturing one. Webster hopes her work can restore faith. “I want people to love the planet,” she said.
This summer, Webster will be included in exhibitions across the New York area. In addition to the Paula Cooper show, her work will be featured in group shows at the Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea (until July 31), the Parrish Museum in Water Mill (Aug. 1 to Nov. 8), and the Church in Sag Harbor (June 20 to Sept. 6). The Sag Harbor exhibit will bring her “Moss Bed” back to life, if only for 11 weeks.
“The greatest challenge that she’s faced is the same thing that makes her work so extraordinary: the ephemerality,” said Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation. “I’m sure it has impacted her place in history.”
Morgan included several major works by Webster in the celebrated “Minimal” exhibition she organized at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris last year and, in April, closed a two-year presentation of Webster’s sculptures at Dia Beacon in the Hudson Valley of New York. But, she noted, Webster remains lesser known than male peer sculptors like Richard Serra, Michael Heizer and Andy Goldsworthy.
Webster told me she was feeling ambivalent about having dedicated so much of her life to art that ceases to exist when it is not on view. After her Dia exhibition came down, “I immediately got the flu, so I must be having some emotional reaction,” she said. Webster is also undergoing treatment for breast cancer. While she feels like she is getting stronger and is “determined to beat it,” she finds herself returning to the idea of creating art now that will outlast her. “I’m wondering if I don’t want to have something more permanent,” she said.
She encouraged a visit to one of her permanent works — she has several, although they are a fraction of her output — just a few minutes’ walk from the gallery. “Stonefield” is a 2010 installation in Hudson River Park near West 24th Street featuring rocks she selected carefully from nearby quarries and placed around the pier. On a warm afternoon, some of the boulders looked like seals sunning themselves on the shore.
Webster has worked with natural materials since she was a student at Yale. Her interest in immersive installations crystallized in 1983, after one of her graduate school professors shared an article in class about the danger of a Russian nuclear attack. The following year, she created an enveloping arc in hay that could hold several people at once (imagine a Richard Serra-like form that is human scale and smells like a barnyard).
“I’m just trying to counteract this notion of everything blowing up,” Webster said. “There’s so much destruction. I want people to feel good, but also physically attend to objects.”
Webster’s art requires more upkeep than most. Every few weeks, Paula Cooper staff members replace some of the spiral’s dried-out branches with fresh ones bought from a local wholesaler. When the gallery presented “Moss Bed” at Art Basel in Paris last year, a staff member misted the work every morning and evening. (The high-maintenance sculpture did not sell.)
Raised in New Hampshire and Virginia, Webster had a suburban childhood. She wasn’t particularly interested in environmental issues until she took an ecology course as an undergraduate. But riding horses as a young girl taught her about how to take care of another living thing. It was a lesson she did not recall learning from her mother, who died of a barbiturate and alcohol overdose when Webster was 16. Is there a connection between the lack of care she received as a child and the constant maintenance her artworks require? “I think there is,” Webster said. “My parent pain, my loss pain — we carry it, it’s in our bodies.”
Webster’s interest in art that is anti-monumental, comfortingly enveloping, and soft around the edges puts her at odds with the artistic movements she is most associated with: land art and minimalism. While she makes minimal forms — cones, cylinders, spirals — she is not interested in the industrial or mass-produced. “Her work is in reference to that work and at the same time totally undermining it,” Morgan said.
Like other female environmental artists of her generation, including Mary Miss and Jody Pinto, Webster works primarily in urban settings rather than the vast expanse of the American West, where many of her male peers were drawn. She had a brief stint working as an assistant to Heizer, the creator of the 1½-mile-long “City” in the Nevada desert. But she notes that his work is more about mastering nature than communing with it. “Heizer doesn’t care about the grass,” she said. “I care about the twigs and the plants and the soil.”
Webster frequently wonders whether she has been successful in her effort to make people care more about the environment. She was dismayed to learn that a museum that recently showed her work planned to cut down trees on its property. “They sat with my work … and now they’re just cutting trees down,” she said. “They didn’t get it somehow. An artist can only touch things. Should I become an ecologist?”
It’s a strange question to hear from an octogenarian. But Webster is full of ideas about what to do next: perhaps something architectural, or a project that is part garden, part rewilded forest. Leigh Arnold, a curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas who included Webster in the 2023 exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art,” noted that Webster’s ambivalence about ephemerality is deeply relatable.
“Her work is about mortality and our obsession with permanence,” Arnold said. “She’s at a moment in the life cycle of her work, of her own life cycle, where she’s thinking, ‘What is going to be left when I’m not here?’ That’s the most universal question that humans ask themselves as they age.”
While Webster’s installations are recycled after every showing, they live on in unorthodox ways. Arnold cherishes the memory of lying down in “Moss Bed” before the work was destroyed at the end of “Groundswell.” She also turned remnants of Webster’s 1984 rammed earth sculpture, “Long Gates,” into bookends that sit in her office. Like life, what makes Webster’s work feel precious is that its fullest expression is fleeting.
On a recent visit to Webster’s Paula Cooper show, I spotted a spider, no larger than a lentil, crawling around the edge of an aluminum cone. The sculpture — one of the domestic-scale works that Webster creates in part so she has something to sell — has the precision and aloofness of classic minimalism. But “Thicket” had done exactly what Webster had meant it to do: bring the natural world inside. You can’t weave a majestic branch spiral without inviting in a bug or two.