On view at Dia Beacon are five of Robert Smithson's indoor earthworks from the late 1960s, made with materials such as sand, gravel, mirrors, and glass. Deeply informed by science in its popularized forms—such as science fiction literature and cinema, encyclopedic collections, and natural history museums—his practice addresses processes of accumulation, displacement, and entropy in order to reveal the contradictions in our visible world. 

Smithson focused his career on a reconsideration of sculpture in relation to nature. He began his career as a painter but in the mid-1960s started experimenting with different media including sculpture, writing, drawing, film, and eventually, earthworks. Sometimes the results were fleeting documentations, other times permanent, large-scale sculptural interventions—as in the case of Spiral Jetty (1970), the earthwork maintained by Dia on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake, Utah.