In Land/Sky, on view now through January 30, 2016, ecology, philosophy, poetry, and humor come together in concept-driven artworks and ephemera by six artists who first gained recognition in the 1960s. The exhibition features early works by Michelle Stuart who pioneered the use of natural materials in synthesizing drawing, sculpture, and Land Art; Agnes Denes, internationally recognized for creating the first performative and participatory site-specific pieces with ecological concerns; Robert Watts (1923–1988), the highly innovative and influential artist whose career encompassed the major art movements of his time from Neo-Dada and Pop to Fluxus and Conceptual Art; Geoffrey Hendricks, associated with Fluxus since the mid-1960s and known since that time for his singular dedication to the sky as the subject of his paintings, objects, and performances; and Peter Moore (1932–1993), celebrated for his extensive photographic documentation of the avant-garde art, performance and dance scene in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Works on view by Agnes Denes include her vintage color photographs of Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, the site work she created in 1982 with the support of the Public Art Fund. Earlier this year, Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, invited Denes to recreate the piece, long recognized as one of Land Art’s most radical and significant works, on twelve acres in the center of Milan, Italy. The exhibition also features Denes’s newest sculpture, made from the seeds harvested in Italy and a photographic sculpture edition produced for the benefit of Socrates Sculpture Park, which commissioned The Living Pyramid (2015), Denes’s first major site work in New York since Wheatfield. Michelle Stuart’s lifelong fascination with both the heavens and earth is seen in Events Becalmed (1969–70), a mixed media floor piece, exhibited here for the first time, and the drawing Moon (1969), which articulates the lunar surface in graphite strokes, both from an early series inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing. The rich texture and reddish tones in Galesteo (c. 1977), a large-scale work from the artist’s well-known series of “scrolls,” and the smaller Mesa de Guadalupe, New Mexico (1974), were produced by rubbing earth from specific locations into muslin-backed rag paper. Among several works on view by Robert Watts is Chrome Stones (1963), one of his earliest experiments with electroplating quotidian objects within the artist’s expansive, ongoing exploration of the phenomenology of light. The exhibition also pays homage to Watts’s Earth Day Watch The Sky, an event staged by the artist on April 22, 1970 when he hired a skywriter to draw cosmic circles above Manhattan, seen in vintage photographs by Peter Moore.

While clouds and the sky have been the subject of numerous works by many Fluxus artists, art historian Kristine Stiles notes that Geoffrey Hendricks’s “constant dedication to sky as a leitmotiv of his paintings and performances singles out this subject from their concerns …” In Sky Shovel (1968), Hendricks creates a surreal paradox by contrasting the cerulean sky and fluffy clouds with steel, wood and stone in his painting on an actual shovel holding a pile of rocks.

The exhibition also features the poster depicting Robert Morris’s Observatory Earthwork: Project for Sonsbeek 71 for his Tate Gallery exhibition that year, Watts’s Airmail Luna Stamps (1984), and other ephemera. Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.