On a mild evening last April, Room 304 in Pratt Institute’s architecture school, Higgins Hall—an oddly grandiose double-height classroom space with a view of the Manhattan skyline—is packed. The Landscape Seminar Series—launched in 2022 in conjunction with Pratt’s Master of Landscape Architecture program—has invited the iconic land artist and activist Mary Miss to speak as this year’s guest speaker. People squeeze through the door, sit on chairs, on the floor, or stand at the back. At the front, Mary Miss is seated calmly beside longtime friend, collaborator, and Pratt faculty member Elliott Maltby—their chairs angled toward one another— they wait for the right moment to commence. A lull in the buzz of the audience, and they smile and nod to each other. Time to start. The overhead projector snaps on, and all eyes lift together toward the image appearing on the screen behind Miss and Maltby.

A hole in a field—large, dark, square. Or rather: not a hole, but the result of an absence—a dropped surface. As if whatever once supported it had disappeared, and now, along the perimeter of that absence—of that void—protrude the severed ends of dimensional lumber, structurally joined, running horizontally and vertically to support the green skin of the earth. A slim ladder leans unceremoniously against one of the edges—inviting into the void.

Now inside that hole–absence–void: looking up and out toward the open sky above, grass blades fringe the edges of this murky beneath-space. Along the walls of the pit, the matrix of wood blurs into subterranean darkness. It feels musty—primal.

Then, a shift in scale. Withdrawn from that down-below—high-above—from a bird’s-eye view. An array of three neat, multi-tiered wooden towers comes into focus. They appear as markers staking out the field. Further up-field, the sunken space is seen too—and from this zoomed-out context, it becomes clear: these structures are not discrete. They do not announce themselves individually. They are in constant communication—soliciting a sense of communion and commonality: physically, across space, and in the mind of the viewer—or, more aptly put, the traveler—across time.

The project is called Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys. Built between 1977–78, it constitutes one of Miss’s earliest large-scale land art installations. She constructed it herself, with only minimal assistance, and is widely seen as her debut in the land art movement. Although the piece is long demolished, as is unfortunately true for much of her early outside work, it is incredible how much still is conveyed even through a few images. As the work’s title suggests, by adding more elements to the site, Miss creates a dynamic web whose components not only relate to one another but also endeavor to highlight the shared field they occupy—tree-lined, sloped and ambling.

Though photographs do capture some of these details, it is through moving one’s body in and across her work, Miss assures the audience during her talk, that the layering of elements really becomes tangible. The traveler “engages in the making of the piece; movement is necessary for it to become visible.” Their presence synthesizes and focuses. In a later one-on-one meeting, Miss and I spoke further about this:

Zoë Tank (ZT): Why is movement so fundamental to understanding your work?

Mary Miss (MM): I love moving—being able to feel what you walk into, walk through. Growing up as a woman, there were so many places where you simply couldn’t walk freely—or at all. I think that’s one of the reasons I incorporated movement into my work: as a form of resistance against that restriction.
The other thing that comes with movement is the ability to scale space—and the things in it—according to your position. That helps establish a real understanding. I was always very conscious of scale.

ZT: Was the concept of scale an interest shared within the established land artist community?

MM: No, not at all. In fact, they seemed completely unaware of it. I could never understand why artists like Heizer or Smithson wanted to make their marks out in the desert—it had no scale! The scale of the West is such that no matter how big the spiral was, it was never going to be big enough to contend or communicate with the landscape. You see massive infrastructure and machinery out there, but it still feels modest in the context of the land. To me, they were treating the land like a blank slate—almost just like a canvas.

ZT: So how was your approach different?

MM: What I knew—what I’d learned from watching the landscape out the window of our family Chevy as a kid—was the scalability of things. Barbed wire fences, for example, miles and miles away, appeared as a faint white line. Gappy picket fences, bounding suburban homes, blurred and opaqued and became solid as we sped past. That was something I understood and could really believe in. So as a young artist, that kind of direct engagement was very interesting to me—how to get people to really consider the land. How do you decompose a landscape? How do you see its layers? How to show their change and fluidity. That’s still the kind of thing I’m compelled by.

ZT: Was there a point when you consciously began integrating walking as a core method for experiencing your work?

MM: Probably sometime around 1969, with Ropes/Shore—my earliest walking-based project. I anchored ropes with rocks along half a mile of shoreline on Ward’s Island. I liked the idea that you couldn’t see the whole thing at once—you had to walk the edge. That launched the concept of decoding for me—embedding content into the land for walkers to discover.

ZT: It’s uncanny how the time it takes to walk a site seems to mirror the time needed to process it—what you’re walking across, by, and through.

MM: Yes—if one is walking, time becomes your companion. I really expanded on that in Greenwood Pond: Double Site at the Des Moines Art Center. I got to collaborate with scientists, historians, community members—they told me stories about how the pond used to freeze thick enough to skate on, and how that was changing. I wanted all those temporal layers, all that knowledge, to be accessible to others too.


After that, making those layers visible became my main focus. The hardest part is figuring out how to share that knowledge without being didactic. How do you preserve the experience while conveying the content? That’s the challenge. And I think I’ve failed at times. I’m still figuring it out.

Driven by these questions—and emboldened by a series of successful community outreach projects in the early 2000s—Miss founded City as Living Laboratory (CALL) in 2008, a public forum dedicated to advancing environmental and ecological awareness. Since its inception, CALL has received multi-million-dollar endowments for its provocative proposals—expanding both the range and the ambition of its initiatives. But the risks have grown too. Just a couple months ago, a critical federal grant from the National Science Foundation for the WaterMarks project in Milwaukee was suddenly revoked—despite nearly a decade of dedicated groundwork and community engagement. Miss however remains unphased. She has since launched a public fundraising appeal to complete the project independently.

With over fifty years of prolific work behind her, Miss’s persistent curiosity and commitment to learning is remarkable. She goes about her work with what Maltby describes as “baffling modesty”— evident even in the scattered notes of her sketchbooks, which often feature phrases like: “thinking about”, “still want to figure out”, “there’s some part I am missing”. Lyrical in their hesitance—strewn across pages without apparent system or order—her words, interspersed with sketches and clippings, somehow coalesce into a strange but compelling visual rhythm, reminiscent of her built work.

In his 1851 essay titled ‘Walking’, Thoreau wrote: “What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk.”

To recognize the presence of such magnetism—as Miss does in her work—is to activate a subliminal process of decoding, one that leads to an innate but unteachable understanding for the way things are. Miss is convinced of our ability to engage with that process—given the right support. The power of her work is a testament to its effect—one which, in human perception at least, prompts an experiential recalibration:

The hovering blue dots peppered across Boulder, Colorado in the project Connect the Dots—indicating the 500-year flood line of Boulder Creek—morph and merge to reveal the reality of burst banks and rushing water – rolling, wrecking, drowning everything below that indicated mark.

Two diverging paths of Greenwood Pond: Double Site, one skirting the edge of the pond, the other plunging directly into it—sinking slowly, until it only remains as the slightest reference across the water’s surface—then re-emerges at the other end to rejoin the other path. The shock of omnipresent parallel existences.

The meadow of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys is no longer just a clearing. The three towers, two semi-circular mounds and one pit, has provoked it into action. It now hosts them and in so doing has assumed an intangible but very real three-dimensional presence of its own. It claims a space within the existent space – and, paradoxically, that open field in far-flung Nassau County – has now become interior, intimate, private.

As the Landscape Seminar Series event nears its end that evening, the audience hums with insight. Reciprocity underpins everything. Miss prepares space for the traveler to come into enlightenment. She invites them to immerse themselves in witnessing the earth, and its myriad actors, and to listen to what they have to say. She has ensured that her work can only completely actualize itself when the traveler does so. A big gamble, but it seems to be working.

A hand shoots up from out of the hushed audience:

“What advice do you have for the young?”

Mary Miss smiles, almost conspiratorially.

“Make paths. Make lots of paths. Just go for it.”