The Center for Land Use Interpretation Newsletter

CLUI Talks and Exhibits On The Road

709 The open road. Looking east from Wendover Peak along I-80 and the Bonneville Salt Flats. CLUI photo by Steve Rowell

VARIOUS EXISTING CLUI EXHIBITS WERE displayed here and there this spring and summer. The Nellis Range Complex: A Global Bombing Microcosm exhibit, recently updated with the help of the Royal College of Art in London, was shown at the PhotoEspana exhibit in Madrid, Spain in June and July. Formations of Erasure: Earthworks and Entropy, an exhibit about the transformation of land art, recently returned from being displayed at the Princeton School of Architecture, and is being serviced before its next deployment.

Some new commissioned projects for other venues include an automatic digital presentation about some of the American Land Museum artifacts on display at Southbase, in Wendover, Utah, organized for an exhibition called The End of the End of the Line, at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. The 1996 CLUI publication The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America's Nuclear Proving Grounds, has been redesigned and developed as an interactive projection exhibit. Also, for the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, as part of an exhibit called Aquatopia, the Center created a digital display about water-related sites in the Central Valley of California. In Denver, Colorado, the Center devised an underground tour system for a new urbanist community called Bel Mar, being built in the suburbs in Lakewood, on the site of a formerly dead mall.

In addition to addressing visiting groups and classes at the Center’s main office in Los Angeles, members of the CLUI administrative staff are often asked to talk about the Center at schools, universities, to sit on panels, and participate in symposia.

Erik Knutzen, for example, has addressed audiences in New York City, Los Angeles, and Holland, where he is making another visit this summer. In the past few months, Matthew Coolidge has lectured at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, the University of Utah Art Department, the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, (as part of Houston’s Photofest), San Diego State University’s Art Department, the University of California, Irvine, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Architecture Department at the federal academy in Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Princeton School of Architecture and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, as part of a bushwhack through the Ivy League. He was very sorry to have missed his talk at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in July, however. The plane he was in had an engine failure while flying over the Rocky Mountains (though it was described by the flight attendant at the time as a ”minor maintenance problem”). After an immediate and steep descent, the plane landed safely and quickly at the small airport at Colorado Springs, too far to make it to Minneapolis on time.