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Indeed, City was built on Western Shoshone land, says Alicia Harris, an Assiniboine professor of Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma. In 2020, she submitted a PhD dissertation entitled “Homescapes: Indigenous Land Art and Public Memory,” in which she argued that works by the likes of Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria — despite being cast as trenchant critiques of the commoditization of galleries and the New York-centered art world in the ’70s — reaffirm the structure of settler colonialism. “Land art made by settlers can’t function as a wholesale rejection of capitalism and the market economy, because the land used to create those works was still considered ‘property,’” she wrote.

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“All these artists ended up wanting to do these pieces out where I’m from, out in the desert of the American Southwest,” Chacon said, speaking to the wave of artists who headed out west in the 1960s and ’70s to create land art. “They came to the lands of the Hopi, the Paiute, the Navajo, in Utah and New Mexico. Why didn’t they do it in Berkeley or New York City?”

Heizer, with Dwan’s support, purchased the Garden Valley tract in 1972. Today, the land beneath City is jointly owned by Michael Heizer and the Triple Aught Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in 1998 specifically to oversee the work.

Heizer’s insistence that the choice of place was incidental has been echoed in the reception of City’s site as a blank canvas ever since. When Senator Harry Reid previewed the work during the Obama administration, he instantly became a City fanatic, telling the Washington Post, “the visuals are dramatic … seeing nothing for miles and miles and then, out of the middle of nowhere is this massive thing.” Reid’s visit turned out to be integral to City’s future. President Obama, who was considering a proposal for the construction of a nuclear waste line through the region, decided at Reid’s beckoning to declare the 704,000 acres of land around City as public land as part of the Basin and Range National Monument, protecting it from development for posterity. The irony is that City might never have opened to visitors had the land it sits on not been federalized; because it is part of a national monument, it must be open to the public by law. Meanwhile, that City is in the “middle of nowhere” has fast become a truism in reporting about the work.

In conversation, Harris referenced the lives and activism of Mary and Carrie Dann, who fought for the recognition of their tribal lands as part of the Western Shoshone Nation. The 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, the Dann sisters argued, formally enshrined their claim to the Western Shoshone territory, a 60 million-acre carpet of land that covers parts of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and California. The Nevada Museum of Art, which holds archival materials related to Heizer and the Triple Aught Foundation, also collects photographs and documents related to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, founded by the Dann sisters to mobilize against the United States’s encroachment on ancestral lands.

Neither Heizer nor the Triple Aught Foundation responded to requests for comment. A line in the foundation’s press release about the project states that “Triple Aught Foundation respectfully acknowledges that City has been created within the ancestral territories of the Nuwu (Southern Paiute) and Newe (Western Shoshoni), who lived in and around the vicinity and call this land home, as their ancestors did before them.”