In this special conversation at the Yale Center for British Art, acclaimed British artist Richard Long talks about his installation, Gravity, a site-specific work conceived for the YCBA’s Entrance Court, with James Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art.

This program is free to attend; registration is not required.

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About this program:

Long, the renowned British land artist, will be in conversation with Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to discuss his YCBA installation, his career and artistic practice, and more.

About the speaker
Richard Long has been in the vanguard of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking over half a century ago in 1967, while still a student. This photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. Through this medium of walking, time, space, and distance became new subjects for his art. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world, including a walk in the Alps that was documented by his first text work for the seminal exhibition of minimal and conceptual works titled When Attitude Becomes Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. After 1969, he began making journeys and sculptures in wilderness places all around the world.

In the 1980s, Long began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints, or stone, often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites. Long mediates on his experience of these places, from mountains through to deserts, shorelines, grasslands, rivers, and snowscapes, according to archetypal geometric marks and shapes, made by his footsteps alone or gathered from the materials of the place. These walks and temporary works of passage are recorded with photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names, and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.

Long was born in Bristol, UK, in 1945 and he lives and works between London and Bristol. He studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol (1962–65), then St Martin’s School of Art, London (1966–68).