City is a piece of earth art located in Garden Valley, a desert valley in rural Lincoln County

Lincoln County, Nevada

Lincoln County is a county located in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2000 census, the population was 4,165. Its county seat is Pioche.-History:...

 in the U.S. state

U.S. state

A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...

 of Nevada

Nevada

Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

, near the border with Nye County

Nye County, Nevada

-National protected areas:* Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge* Death Valley National Park * Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest * Spring Mountains National Recreation Area -Demographics:...

. The work was begun in 1972 by the artist Michael Heizer

Michael Heizer

Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist specializing primarily in large-scale sculptures and earth art .Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944; and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Traveling to New York City in 1966, he began his career producing more conventional, small-scale...

 and is ongoing. Like his previous Double Negative

Double Negative (artwork)

Double Negative is a piece of land art located in the Moapa Valley on Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada. Double Negative was completed in 1969 by the artist Michael Heizer....

(1969), City is designed and executed on a massive scale. Covering a space approximately one and a quarter miles long and more than a quarter of a mile wide (2 km by 0.4 km, roughly the scale of the National Mall

National Mall

The National Mall is an open-area national park in downtown Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. The National Mall is a unit of the National Park Service , and is administered by the National Mall and Memorial Parks unit...

), City is one of the largest sculptures ever created. Using earth, rocks and concrete as building materials and assembled with heavy machinery, the work comprises five phases, each consisting of a number of structures referred to as complexes, with some of the structures reaching a height of eighty feet.

City attempts to synthesize ancient monument

Ancient monument

An ancient monument is an early historical structure or monument worthy of preservation and study due to archaeological or heritage interest. In the United Kingdom it is a legal term, differing from the American term National Monument in being far more numerous and always man-made...

s, Minimalism

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...

 and industrial technology. The work derives inspiration from Mississippian

Mississippian culture

The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE, varying regionally....

 mounds, Mesoamerican ball courts and Pre-Columbian

Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...

 sites like La Venta

La Venta

La Venta is a pre-Columbian archaeological site of the Olmec civilization located in the present-day Mexican state of Tabasco. Some of the artifacts have been moved to the museum "Parque - Museo de La Venta", which is in Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco....

 as well as Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

. Heizer also cites an interest in the ceremonial squares and associated civic monuments of cites.

In recent years the work has been threatened by the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, a U.S. Department of Energy

United States Department of Energy

The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...

 terminal storage facility for spent nuclear reactor and other radioactive waste

Radioactive waste

Radioactive wastes are wastes that contain radioactive material. Radioactive wastes are usually by-products of nuclear power generation and other applications of nuclear fission or nuclear technology, such as research and medicine...

. The proposed route for the railroad that would ferry the waste from Caliente

Caliente, Nevada

Caliente , formerly known as Culverwell and Calientes is a town in Lincoln County, Nevada, United States. Its elevation is 4,300 feet . The population was 1,123 at the 2000 census...

 to the disposal site cuts across the same valley as City, and would come within its sightline. Heizer feels this will threaten his sculpture, as the location was selected for its isolation, and prefers to see the tracks redirected through nearby Coal Valley and Murphy Gap.

The cost of City is being financed by several patrons, including the Dia Art Foundation

Dia Art Foundation

Dia Art Foundation is a non-profit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 as the Lone Star Foundation by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration...

 and Lannan Foundation, with an estimated cost in the tens of millions of dollars. The work is located on a large parcel of private land owned by the artist and is closed to the public until its completion. Heizer is currently completing the work with a team of roughly a dozen and, as of 2005, anticipated completion before 2010.