How Kent Tames Floodwaters with Art at Earthworks Park

SEATTLE TIMES - MODERNIST LINES DEFINE graceful berms, curved paths and a double-ringed pond in a grassy 2.5-acre expanse of art at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon.

“Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks” is one of the region’s most significant public, environmental and landscape artworks. A prominent example of a nationwide movement known as land art or earth art, it’s part of 104.7-acre Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks Park just east of bustling downtown Kent.

Earth art became popular in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s alongside the beginnings of the environmental movement. At the time, some artists were rejecting the formality of museums and galleries and what they considered the commodification of art in those spaces; they looked at land as their canvas, and to sites for their materials. (One well known piece of land art from that period is Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.)

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