“Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson” at SITE Santa Fe

In November of 2016—that harrowing month in American history—Teresita Fernández gave a lecture on Robert Smithson. In her talk, part of Dia’s acclaimed “Artists on Artists” series, Fernández offered a critique of the Land art icon, one left somewhat implicit. She intercut Smithson’s “nonsites”—those fictional and nonspecific places he concocted to play out hypothetical scenarios—with scenes from her life, and with the realities of actual places.

One slide showed Smithson’s 1969 drawing of asphalt spilling out from a truck and seeping like a tributary, according to the path of least resistance. Next, Fernández showed an image of a newly built Florida highway that bisects an area largely occupied by Indigenous communities.

The comparison speaks volumes, and Fernández largely left her audience to fill in the blanks. Her talk (which you can watch here) is not about all the ways Smithson went wrong so much as it is about that pernicious problem of how to move forward, given the weight of those white male artists who, in the 20th century, set the terms for the next generation of artists to contend with. As Fernández, who was born in 1968 in Miami to Cuban parents in exile, explained: “As art students of color, we learn the canon of the dominant culture before our own.”

“Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson,” a duet of an exhibition on view at SITE Santa Fe through October 28, continues the conversation in a manner punctuated with both admiration and argument. It’s a show full of pairings. Take two elegant works fashioned from the earth. In Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (1970), a linear pile of sand is dotted with mirrors. Nearby, in Fernández’s Sfumato (Epic), from 2014, chunks of graphite are installed on the wall, where they’ve left marks: it’s the artist’s attempt to make a drawing that is also a sculpture. Both pieces are material and pictorial, sleek and dirty.

Fernández’s 2016 lecture offers crucial insight otherwise absent in the show, which is entirely bereft of wall labels—save an introductory blurb that loosely names the two artists’ shared affinities (land, materials, deep time). The show features no new works made in direct response to Smithson, and rather belies the numerous ways that Fernández has grappled with a legacy that has both troubled and inspired her, consciously and otherwise.

An intervention on view midway through the show is the most explicit. There, in a corner, is Hotel Palenque (1969–72), a slideshow of images Smithson took in southern Mexico paired with a recorded lecture he gave about the visit. The piece ends on a racist remark about the “concealed violence” permeating the Mexican landscape, likely owing, Smithson alleges, to the Mexicans who “slice” up their babies and plant them among the corn.

Fernández’s response to this preposterous claim was a slice of her own: a line of smoky charcoal bisects the entire gallery, running behind the screen. It looks like a slash, but also a burn—a reference to the widely used agricultural practice that was also described as “violent” by white settlers who didn’t understand the land.

Art history might present Smithson’s ideas as neutral or universal, but Fernández wants to remind you that the late artist made work from a specific point of view. Underscoring this point are photographs Smithson took in the Yucatán of mirrors scattered among the land—mirrors that never seem to reflect the artist back to show you who made them. These are next to Fernández’s Manigua (Mirror), 2023—a dark forest made in charcoal, black sand, and aluminum, with a polished surface that reflects the viewer among the trees.

Fernández works with earthly materials and in talks always points to the (neo)colonialist global supply chains that carried them around the world: she sources charcoal from Sri Lanka, malachite from the Congo, and graphite from the UK. If Smithson showed that humans are relentlessly shaping the land, Fernández shows that we do so unevenly.

But with no explicit mention of such material supply chains in the show itself, the exhibition risks reducing her work to mere elegance. When she speaks, Fernández is an artist of rare articulateness, but her works seem less interested in communicating her ideas. Her most decorative-seeming work in the show is Ink Sky 2 (2011), comprising shiny cubes that dangle from a mirrored ceiling. Chorus (2019) offers a clearer critique: dozens of charcoal-coated conch shells arranged on the floor cleverly force Minimalism’s sleek seriality to confront the specificities of the natural world.

In addition to criticisms of Smithson, the show offers an exciting glimpse at his stranger side, including lesser-known and previously unexhibited kitschy, homoerotic, and unrealized works, which Fernández curated in collaboration with Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. Ink Sky 2 is on view in a room about the cosmos, shown alongside a group of Smithson’s bizarre zodiac drawings from the 1960s. Elsewhere, a Smithson collage surrounds pictures of turtles by the word “algae,” hand painted over and over in different shades of green. An undated Smithson doodle depicts an island so covered in flags that it looks like it had been stabbed in a bout of mania. Fernández shows us a Smithson (and a history, and a landscape) more complex, messy, and fraught than we can readily see. But instead of simply cancelling the artist, “Pablo-matic”-style, the show confronts the complications and contradictions, leaving viewers with a Smithson who is flawed, yes—but also, wonderfully weird.