Walter De Maria

Walter De Maria was an American artist known for his minimal and conceptual art and his use of landscape in his works. Originally from California, De Maria moved to New York in his mid-twenties 1960, where he started using geometric shapes and manufactured materials in his works, many of which are huge installations filling rooms and fields. His most well known series consists of The Lightning Field, The Vertical Kilometer, The Broken Kilometer, and The Earth Room. The Lightning Field is a one mile by one kilometer grid of metal posts in New Mexico that brings manmade materials outdoors, while The Earth Room is an apartment full of dirt here in Soho that blurs the lines between inside and outside.

De Maria lived and worked in his home, an abandoned Con-Ed substation-turned-studio on 421 East 6th Street in the East Village from 1980 until his death in 2013.