Bill Dilworth, the beloved caretaker of Walter De Maria‘s New York Earth Room, has died at 70. The New York Times reported on Saturday that he died on December 10, 2024, of a stroke, though his passing was not a matter of public knowledge until the Times obituary was published.
For 35 years, Dilworth tended to the 1977 De Maria piece, an installation composed of 280,000 pounds of dirt piled two feet high. (Visitors stand behind glass and are not allowed to walk on the dirt.) Managed by the Dia Art Foundation, the piece has been open to the general public since 1980 and has since become a point of pilgrimage and a cult favorite. The pop star Lorde even featured an Earth Room lookalike in a recent music video.
The dirt in that room looks natural and stately, in large part thanks to the behind-the-scenes labor of Dilworth, who took the job in 1989 and held it until his retirement in 2024. Prior to taking the role, he had only seen a 1977 picture of the piece—the only approved photograph of it in existence. He came to know the work intimately, spending many hours of his life maintaining it.
In a 2023 New Yorker article, for example, Dilworth described careful thought over how the dirt was moved around. He began with a cultivator, a piece of agricultural equipment with sharp disks, then switched to a rake at the advice of Heiner Friedrich, a Dia founder.
He also paid mind to the moistness of the earth, watering it regularly. “Just to get it back to this moist state is gratifying to me, because this is the state that I relate to, that I maintained for decades,” he told the New Yorker, having spent the prior two days watering the dirt.
Born in 1954 in Detroit, Dilworth attended art school at Wayne State University, where he met his wife Patti, who later became the caretaker of another De Maria work under Dia’s aegis, The Broken Kilometer (1979). Dilworth became an abstract painter and would continue to paint for many years.
But he was known mainly for caring for sites like The New York Earth Room. Before taking that job, he had also maintained the Church of St. Teresa, which dates back to the 19th century and is located on New York’s Lower East Side. His Earth Room job came by happenstance. “I was with my friend who was the building operations guy at Dia and he had to look at these pipes for something,” Dilworth told Artsy. “Over my shoulder, I saw the guy at the desk here and afterwards I asked my friend Jim, ‘Does that job ever open up?’ And he said no. Two months later, it did.”
One might expect a deeper understanding of The New York Earth Room after years of working inside it. Yet Dilworth said in interviews that he was loath to explain it because De Maria himself declined to do so when he was alive.
“It’s about earth, art, and quiet,” Dilworth told the New Yorker, adding, “People look at it, and they think nothing’s growing, and I say, ‘Look at it again, time is growing out there.’”
