Background

De Maria was born in Albany, California, United States, on October 1, 1935. His parents were the owners of a local restaurant and were socially active in the community.

Education

As a child, Walter de Maria was shy and was highly interested in music. Initially, he learned to play the piano, and then moved on to perform on percussion instruments. He was also fond of cars and sports, of which he made drawings.

He took his creative hobbies really seriously and by the age of sixteen had joined a musicians' union. Since 1953 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where in 1957 he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and in 1959 obtained his Master of Fine Arts. During his studies, he focused on history and then painting, while continuing to play jazz music, sometimes performing with his painting professor David Park.

Career

In 1960 De Maria moved to New York City and joined the downtown arts scene. De Maria and his friend, the avant-garde composer La Monte Young, were involved in "happenings", helping to operate a gallery space with Robert Whitman on Great Jones Street for events and exhibitions, as well as musical and theatrical productions in the 1960s. Around this time Walter De Maria also started to explore three-dimensional art.

His friendships with the composer La Monte Young and choreographer Simone Forti were pivotal influences in this period of his life. They pushed him towards both Minimalism on a grand scale and interactive sculpture as genres of artistic pursuit, and also all forms of more material creative outcomes.

Walter De Maria made viewer-interactive artworks that were greatly inspired by Dada and imbued with both minimalist and conceptual tendencies. His piece, Boxes for Meaningless Work (1961), asked for viewers to "Transfer things from one box to the next box back and forth, back and forth, etc." while being advised to "Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless."

De Maria and Robert Whitman established the 9 Great Jones Street gallery in New York in 1963. The same year De Maria's first one-man exhibition of sculpture took place there. With the help of collector Robert C. Scull, the artist started making pieces in metal in 1965. He had his first one-man show in a commercial gallery in 1965, at the Paula Johnson Gallery on New York's Upper East Side. Actually, De Maria avoided participating in museum exhibits when he could. He preferred to make his installations outdoors or at unconventional urban locations.

Concurrently, De Maria's continued to play and create his music during his early career. He composed two pieces titled Cricket Music (1964) and Ocean Music (1968), and played in jazz and rock bands around New York City. In 1964 he became a member of the band The Primitives, which later transformed into The Velvet Underground, the avant-rock group championed by Andy Warhol. Warhol was an icon of Pop art and he featured the musicians John Cale and Lou Reed. Besides, De Maria was a part of an artist/musician collaborative group, which was called The Druds. However, he avoided public recognition and fame. He rarely gave interviews and he tried not to be photographed.

By the late 1960s, De Maria became involved in various artistic activities. He continued working within Minimalist and Conceptualist structures, and was recommended for the Dwan gallery by fellow artists, including Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre. His piece, Cage, for John Cage, was included in the seminal 1966 Primary Structures exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1969 he produced two films, Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert and also Hardcore.

His relationship with Heiner Friedrich was a crucial one, as the German art dealer became the founder of the Dia Art Foundation in the United States. It funded four of de Maria's most important site-specific Earthwork installations in the 1970s, including Earth Room, The Lightning Field, Vertical Earth Kilometer, and The Broken Kilometer.

In 1968 and 1977, Walter De Maria participated in Documenta in Kassel. He installed his permanent public sculpture Vertical Earth Kilometer in the city's Friedrichsplatz Park. A major exhibition of De Maria's sculpture was organized at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1972.

In the year 1980, he bought a four-story, 16,400-square-foot Con Edison substation at 421 East Sixth Street, and an adjacent plot at No. 419, between First Avenue and Avenue A. In 1989 De Maria completed his work on a sphere of polished granite for the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. This artwork was followed in 2000 and 2004 by works for two museums on Naoshima Island in Japan, the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum and the Chichu Art Museum. His 25-ton sculpture entitled Large Red Sphere (2002) was installed in the Türkentor, Munich, in 2010. Organized by the Menil Collection in 2011, "Walter De Maria: Trilogies" became the artist's first major museum show in the United States.

In 2010, The 2000 Sculpture (1992) was the first work of art to open the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. De Maria went to California to visit his mother on her 100th birthday in 2013. Only a few days later he suffered a stroke. He remained there for treatment but died soon.

Achievements

• 

  Walter De Maria played a key role in both Minimalism and Land Art. He strongly influenced not only his peers but also later generations of artists. His artworks moved the boundaries of public sculpture helping establish Earthworks and Land Art as important creative expressions of contemporary art. De Maria is also credited for accepting the fact that people can view collections not only at a particular museum location but also at more specific and unusual places.
  
  De Maria held a great number of solo exhibitions and created sculptures that can be found around the world, from Paris to Munich. His importance was recognized by many in the art world.
  
  In 2015 a movie entitled Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art came out. The story was produced and directed by a filmmaker and art historian James Crump. The movie contains some rare footage of De Maria and his extant and non-extant artworks.
  
  Nowadays, De Maria’s art pieces are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.

Works

More photos

• installation

  • The Lightning Field

  • Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown

  • 5-7-9 Series

  • Square

  • One Sun

  • Triangle, Circle, Square

  • Art by Telephone

  • Cage II

  • High Energy Bar and Certificate

  • The 2000 Sculpture

  • Earth Room

  • Mile Long Drawing

  • Broken Kilometer

  • Time/Timeless/No Time

  • Instrument for LaMonte Young

  • Circle/Rectangle 7

  • Zinc pyramid

  • Hard core

  • Ball drop

  • Dirt box

  • Garbo column

  • Silver portrait of Dorian Gray

• painting

  • The Pure Polygon Series: six plates

  • Razor Piece

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Grey mountains with jet plane

  • Blue mountain with tanks

  • Red volcano

• photo

  • Hard Core

Views

Quotations: "I like natural disasters and I think that they may be the highest form of art possible to experience."

"Every good work should have at least ten meanings."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Michael Govan: "I think he [Walter De Maria] is one of the greatest artists of our time. His work is singular, sublime and direct."

Interests

• music, cars, sports

Connections

De Maria married his wife Susanne Wilson (later Susanna) in 1961. The couple later divorced.

Spouse:

Susanna Wilson

References

• Walter De Maria: Meaningless Work This book challenges established histories and methodologies for the art of the 1960s and ’70s, while also exploring de Maria’s own obsessions with art’s uttermost possibilities.
  2016
• Walter De Maria: Trilogies These three trilogies challenge and broaden our understanding of the artist's work.
  2011