EARTH.SPEAKS
brooke smiley: EARTH.SPEAKS
Green Box Arts Public Art Collection
Adjacent to the Red Butte Recreation Area West Trailhead
6990 Lake Street, Green Mountain Falls, CO 80819
Admission: free
Review by José Antonio Arellano
EARTH.SPEAKS ámanikyatumɵ’ɵvi or “Resting Hand” sits in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. Comprising five Superadobe benches bisected by Fountain Creek, the work inverts the propositions of the canonical Land Art of the 1970s. Where Robert Smithson built at a scale that eclipses the human body on land long treated as empty, brooke smiley, an Osage artist, created with the human body in mind on land she acknowledged as inhabited.
brooke smiley, EARTH.SPEAKS, 2023, adobe, designed in collaboration with Cassandra Atencio and the Southern Ute Tribe, located at Green Box Arts. Image by Jeff Kearney.
During her Green Box artist residency in 2023, smiley contacted the Southern Ute Cultural Preservation Officers Cassandra Atencio and Crystal Rizzo. Atencio gave the work its Ute title. Combining the Superadobe practice she learned from CalEarth and the multiple somatic practices in which she is certified, smiley worked with local residents to construct the benches using the local soil. Drawing attention to their bodies as they worked, smiley guided the residents’ awareness to the interaction between their presence and the site.
A portrait of brooke smiley with her installation EARTH.SPEAKS, 2023, adobe, designed in collaboration with Cassandra Atencio and the Southern Ute Tribe, located at Green Box Arts. Image by Jeff Kearney.
In the Osage language and way of life, movement, writes smiley, “is a big deal.” [1] Seventy percent of all Osage words are verbs (a total of 432). According to smiley, cardinal directions are not designated with nouns and are instead indicated by movements relative to the landscape.
brooke smiley, EARTH.SPEAKS, 2023, adobe, designed in collaboration with Cassandra Atencio and the Southern Ute Tribe, located at Green Box Arts. Image by Jeff Kearney.
Before deciding on the placement and design of the benches, smiley danced on the site, an improvised and intuitive performance that functioned as a survey of the land and a drafting tool for the eventual work. The resulting benches, what smiley calls earth markers, feel intimate, inviting visitors to sit and appreciate the calming, meditative setting.
brooke smiley, EARTH.SPEAKS, 2023, adobe, designed in collaboration with Cassandra Atencio and the Southern Ute Tribe, located at Green Box Arts. Image by Jeff Kearney.
Of the original five benches, four remain. Although Superadobe is a technique for building structures that endure, the missing bench reminds us of how adobe structures return to the earth from which they are made. Rina Swentzell, the Santa Clara Pueblo architect and scholar, recalls how her grandmother explained how a house can be cared for and healed. [2] Eventually, though, there will come a time for it to return to the earth. Built by residents from the soil of the site, the benches at Green Mountain Falls perhaps share that relation to their ground.
brooke smiley, EARTH.SPEAKS, 2023, adobe, designed in collaboration with Cassandra Atencio and the Southern Ute Tribe, located at Green Box Arts. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
As part of the Green Box’s public artworks, EARTH.SPEAKS is accessible from the Red Butte Recreational Area West, near the Joyland-Pittman Trailhead. While smiley’s work alone is worth the visit, other publicly accessible works, including Yaacov Agam’s Communication X9 and a Keith Haring Fitness Court, are within walking distance, as is James Turrell’s Skyspace.
José Antonio Arellano (he/him) is an Associate Professor of English and fine arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He is the author of Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984.
[1] brooke smiley, "Regenerating the Body of Culture," Creating Justice in a Multiracial Democracy: New Will for Evidence-Based Policies That Work, edited by Alan Curtis (Teachers College Press, 2025) p. 432.
[2] "Rina Swentzell: An Understated Sacredness," ¡COLORES!, produced by Michael Kamins, KNME-TV, January 17, 1990: https://www.newmexicopbs.org/productions/colores/rina-swentzell-an-understated-sacredness/.
