American Frontier: Experiments in the Desert

American Frontier: Experiments in the Desert, a project curated by Emanuele Piccardo and Luca Guido, organized by the cultural association plug_in.aims to demonstrate, for the first time, how architecture, photography, painting, cinema, and art have, at different times, identified the frontier as a field of action to chart new lines of inquiry in the emptiness of the desert. This space emerges as a privileged site for ever-new and more extreme experimentation, precisely because the absence of rules fosters a formal eclecticism free from laws and constraints, except for the relationship with the site and the natural context. This approach was embraced by land artists such as Michael Heizer, James Turrell, Charles Ross, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Dennis Oppenheim, as well as architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri, John Lautner, Bart Prince, Donald Wexler, and Albert Frey, and photographers including Carleton Watkins, Timothy O. Sullivan, William H. Jackson, Richard Misrach, Lee Friedlander, and Francesco Jodice.