Model Desert, Sandbox Monument

The “sand garden” as a pedagogical tool was developed by female kindergartners, pioneers of the American West who introduced making miniature landscapes to children (1870’s). Later, tactile model landscapes were developed at schools for the blind where the teaching of geography thrived. Zonia Baber, the first woman professor of Geography at the University of Chicago, embraced practical learning, and the “Sand Desk” she patented allowed each student to work a miniature land (1896). Intricate and precise topographies modeled on sand tables were instrumental in the military for strategic war plans for the first half of the twentieth century. Gradually post-war, the sandbox as a space of play and tool for learning declined, but became a trope in art. Isamu Noguchi’s “To be Seen from Mars” (1947), was a model made in sand of a 10 mile long landscape. A year after Hiroshima’s bombing, it would attest to the humanity of Earth’s inhabitants when seen from high above. And in 1967, Robert Smithson set to revisit some landscapes of his childhood. On his “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” he saw a “sandbox monument,” which he called a “model desert.” It became for him the epitome of disintegration; the dissolution of the world was embodied in the grains of sand.

In this paper, I will explore how artworks created in sand evoke entropy, chance and the passage of time; I will examine how vast landscapes of social change are tied to intimate spaces that box sand.