A mixed media, found object collaborative installation with sculptor Antoinette Rosato at the Cente for MetaMedia in Plasy, Czech Republic. In this work we investigate the desire of our European ancestors to immigrate to the Untied States and the longing in subsequent generations of Americans for a connection to their roots in the “old world.”

Bill Gilbert, 1998

Bill Gilbert is an artist and the Lannan Chair and the director of the Land Arts of the American West Program, at the University of New Mexico. He completed his undergraduate work in studio art at Swarthmore College and Pitzer College and received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1978. He is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Art & Ecology and the Lannan Endowed chair in Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico. Gilbert created Land Arts of the American West program at UNM in 1999 and co-founded the Art & Ecology emphasis in the Department of Art and Art History in 2007. In 2012, he received a five-year grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to form the Land Arts Mobile Research Center and served as its director 2012-2016. He held the position of Associate Dean of the College of Fe Arts from 2009-2011 and as acting Dean of the College in 2012.

Gilbert has exhibited his place-based, mixed media installation, video and performance works internationally since 1981. He has participated in collaborative projects resulting in exhibitions in US, Ecuador, the Czech Republic, Greece and Canada. He is also a founding member of the Survival Kit Collective and Pup Tent Assembly.

Gilbert has worked extensively with Indigenous groups in the Americas. He received a FIPSE grant to team teach a class with Mary Lewis Garcia at Acoma Pueblo and a Lila Wallace Arts International Grant in 1994 to work with the Quichua people of Ecuador. He has curated numerous exhibitions, written essays and produced a video regarding the work of artists from the US Pueblos, Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico, and Pastaza, Ecuador.

In 2009, the University of Texas Press released Gilbert’s book with professor Chris Taylor entitled Land Arts of the American West. He, also, served on the steering committee for the LAND/ART New Mexico project and authored the introduction for the culminating book LAND/ART published by Radius Books.