SPACES Spotlight: Gregg Blasdel + Clarence Schmidt

Artist, writer, and curator Gregg Blasdel is among the most important and committed documentarians of artist-built environments in the U.S. In 1968, his article “The Grassroots Artist” in Art in America featured the sites of fifteen artists around the country. It was the first time a major, widely circulated art publication acknowledged artist-built environments and inspired a generation of arts enthusiasts to hit the road in search of the sites and others like them. Today, Blasdel continues to photograph environments around the country.

In 2020, Blasdel donated thousands of his photographs to SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), a preservation project of Kohler Foundation, Inc. This inaugural Spaces Spotlight features photographs of Clarence Schmidt’s house and garden, which was located in Woodstock, New York.

From 1940 through 1971, Schmidt worked on a series of structures, installations, and gardens on the side of Ohayo Mountain. For almost as many years, Blasdel documented the project, capturing the evolving iterations of Schmidt’s home and yard. The photographs on view are among the thousands he took of this extraordinary, now destroyed site. They attest to the importance of documentation of ephemeral and changing sites, and to Blasdel’s sensitive and powerful eye.