Quarry Stefan Gonzalez

Stefan Gonzales is an artist and arts educator from Colorado, now based in Seattle. They are Prio/Manso/Tiwa and a trans/nonbinary individual. Stefan chronicles the lives of ordinary objects through photography, sculpture, and installation. Over the last several years, Gonzales’s practice has focused on decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of 1960s–70s land art, which is strongly associated with the “heroic” masculinity and rugged individualism of artists like Robert Smithson. Smithson’s most famous artwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), is a 1,500-foot-long formation in the Great Salt Lake made from over 6,000 tons of displaced dirt and black basalt rocks. The work, alongside other touchstones of land art like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), has what Gonzales calls a remarkable “mythological imprint” that obscures the history and preexisting significance of the site. “They were talking about big, open, free geologic locations,” Gonzales says, “but what about the land that Spiral Jetty sits on? Who occupied the land first? That land had not really been ‘empty’ in the past.”