CEDAR CITY — For more than 40 years, teams of construction workers have been working in the desert, carrying out the vision of a singular artist.

They're making one of the biggest sculptures in human history. It's so top-secret that almost no one in the area has seen it. To say it's monumental in scale is an understatement. The sculpture is a mile-and-a-half long.

It's located 130 miles west of Cedar City, 100 miles north of Las Vegas in Lincoln County, Nevada. After 42 years of construction, it's suddenly controversial.

The artist chose as his canvas a vast desert 30 miles or so from the nearest paved road. It's not far from the infamous secret military base, Area 51.

In the closest towns dozens of miles away, like Alamo, Nevada, some say the ongoing art project is even more secret than Area 51.

“Sometimes the guys will come in and say they’ve been working on it. But nobody will say what it looks like or anything like that,” said resident Bridget Doyle.

Curtis Frehner, also of Alamo, was offered a construction job on the gigantic sculpture way back in 1972.

“Really, I figured it’d flop in six months,” he said.

Forty-two years later, a dozen construction workers travel the road four days a week, heading for a location that's famous among modern art lovers but nearly unknown to the public.

The huge artwork is all but invisible, just a distant view of some kind of horizontal disturbance in the desert. The artist invites few people through the closed gate.

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said Rembrandt was the same.

“He didn’t like people coming into the studio and seeing the paintings before they were finished,” he said. “This is one of the most ambitious artworks ever envisioned, certainly in the United States.”

Govan is chief fundraiser and financial collaborator of world-renowned avant-garde sculptor Michael Heizer. He rarely talks to the media, but he was featured a decade ago in New York Times Magazine.

Heizer's mammoth masterpiece in the desert is called "City."

“It was in 1994 when I first saw it, unfinished,” Govan said. “You do cry. You think, what an incredibly beautiful ambition.”

Heizer pays some of the best wages in the region. So a lot of his employees are afraid to talk for fear of getting fired.

“He keeps to himself most of the time,” said employee Logan Reifsnyder.

He agreed to talk because he decided to quit. "City" is visible on Google Earth.

“(It looks like) a lot of dirt hills, covered in gravel,” Reifsnyder said. It looks like an airport under construction, he said, with a lot of concrete curbing around the hills.

He said it’s a mile and a half long, 500 yards wide.

“There are roads around the hills. It would look like a city if you were driving through it,” Reifsnyder said.

“The way that he does the mounds and everything, there has to be some sort of artistic idea behind it,” Reifsnyder said.

“There is one structure out there. It looks like a concrete L. I don’t know how they did it. It was there when I got there. It does look like it’s floating in the air,” he added.

Govan said Heizer's masterpiece is nearly finished. He provided just three images. To the art world, Heizer is one of the leading figures in what used to be called the land-art movement. Govan said the “City” project calls to mind everything from Mayan architecture to industrial mining.

“He had combined this ancient art history with modern technology,” Govan said. “There is so much to this artwork that is innovative, powerful, American.”

Reifsnyder said, “I’m not into the whole land-art type of thing. So it’s a little weird for me.”

Heizer has already spent more than $25 million, donated by foundations and art lovers.

Bridget Doyle said, “It’s probably worth it to him, you know.”

“It’s absolutely worth it,” Govan said, “because this will rank higher, in my mind, in art history than many things that cost a lot more.”

Curtis Frehner said, "It doesn’t serve any purpose other than something to look at.”

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, recently introduced a bill that would protect 800,000 acres around the sculpture from oil and gas drilling, a sort of buffer zone for the artwork. The energy industry and area landowners are upset. A political fight seems to be shaping up.

Pictures of the project

There are a few very interesting photos of Michael Heizer’s “City.” KSL does not have the legal right to show them full-screen. They can be viewed online at: panorimio.com, doublenegative.tarasen.net, dsmpublicartfoundation.org, and atlasobscura.com.

Related topics