Orisons

Marguerite Humeau: Orisons

San Luis Valley, Hooper, CO

July 29, 2023-June 30, 2025

Curated by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum

Admission: free (advanced reservations required)

Review by Madeleine Boyson

My father spied them first: two Swainson’s hawks at a four-way stop in Hooper, Colorado, perching a quarter mile west of Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons—the 160-acre earthwork we’d driven hours to see. Humeau’s installation is produced by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum and lies on private land owned by Jones Farms Organics in the San Luis Valley, a region these birds favor for breeding before their winter migrations. I cooed hello as we drove past—two guardians at a gravel dead end.

Marguerite Humeau, Sandhill Crane Songs in Orisons, 2023-2025, wind and zinc-passivated recycled steel. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.

Marguerite Humeau, Sandhill Crane Song in Orisons, 2023-2025, wind and zinc-passivated recycled steel. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

Comprising seven scalable “hammocks,” seventy-seven kinetic sculptures, and “the land in its entirety,” Orisons (meaning prayers) promises to “invoke the land’s histories” by transfiguring the plot into a site of veneration. [1] But beyond heart motifs and a general call for love, it is unclear to whom or what the artist supplicates. Instead, Humeau diagnoses the earth’s afflictions and centers herself as its healer, substituting fabricated mythologies for the Valley’s complex realities. By projecting visitors through a futuristic “portal to a post-climate world,” the artist overlooks present circumstances and the fact that, as environmental historian Nancy Langston explains, “we cannot find remedies without knowing what went wrong and why.” [2]

A map of Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons, 2023-2025, curated and produced by Black Cube, A Nomadic Art Museum. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

Humeau’s condition report begins with a star chart-like map of natural, ready-made, and new works clustered amongst borders and ley lines. [3] The artist’s descriptions establish illness: terms like “wounds,” “sadness,” “mixed emotions,” “feeling good,” “asking for help,” “feels a bit bleaker,” “fatigued,” and “vulnerable” appear plucked from a doctor or therapist’s office. Humeau has long interpreted the project plot as sick; in 2022, art historian Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel described the prospective earthwork as healing a “disordered” nature and “repairing a relationship to this land.” [4]

Marguerite Humeau, Horseweed Pendulum in Orisons, 2023-2025, wind, zinc-passivated recycled steel, hand-carved hardwood, stoneware, and luster glaze. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Newly-fabricated sculptures position Humeau as the Valley’s savior and build on her clinical assessments. Zinc-passivated recycled steel ornaments called Sandhill Crane Songs, Spurge Dances, Horseweed Pendulums, and Russian Thistle Spins strategically puncture according to enlightenments from geomancers and psychics, whom the artist consulted during project development. The first sculpture replicates birdsong while the latter three pattern after non-native invasive plants (chosen for their potential medicinal properties) and all propose to call forth rain. [5] Beautiful though they are, these metallic decorations pierce the soil like needles in skin; Humeau even refers to them as “acupuncture,” appropriating the ancient Chinese practice for its “maximum impact.” [6]

A view of Ronald Rael’s adobe bricks under Flying Rain Sandhill Crane in Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons, 2023-2025, recycled steel, hand-woven rope, rye straw, dried flowers, hardwood, horsehair, water stone, stoneware, luster glaze, and lying humans. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Humeau also attempts to remedy through interaction. Visitors are invited to walk on the site, but doing so destroys kangaroo rat burrows and leaves footprints in the mud. Elsewhere, playgrounds with taut ropes and hearts imitate Sandhill Crane wings—extant but fantastical birds that Humeau deems critical here. They support prone guests in hovering over the ground and on their journeys toward recognizing climate change. To climb these hammocks, however, visitors must tread on handmade adobe bricks by architect Ronald Rael, a physically and emotionally precarious act that compounds an awareness of trespassing on this terrain.

A detail view of Flying Rain Sandhill Crane in Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons, 2023-2025, recycled steel, hand-woven rope, rye straw, dried flowers, hardwood, horsehair, water stone, stoneware, luster glaze, and lying humans. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

According to the artist, Orisons exists to give the Valley its due because the landscape is the art. [7] Humeau colonizes wind, clouds, weather, flora, fauna, soil, animal bones, and debris in her position as conduit, a role she sees as merely “to give [Orisons] credit for who it is as an entity, celebrate it, elevate it and care for it, and attempt to reconnect every form of life that has lived on it, is living on it, or will live on it in the future.” [8]

Marguerite Humeau, Spurge Dance in Orisons, 2023-2025, wind, zinc-passivated recycled steel, hand-carved hardwood, stoneware, and luster glaze. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

That’s a tall order for the London-based, French artist who had never visited Colorado before 2022. [9] Humeau and Black Cube met with myriad experts including agronomists, conservationists, ornithologists, musicians, community members, designers, and a single member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc to offset this burden. But though these collaborations resulted in a subtler and more experimental earthwork than the original design, Humeau still projects her own mythologies on a simplified narrative of the San Luis Valley, falling prey to what scholar Jessica Horton refers to as “...a Western landscape tradition devoted to aestheticizing—and anesthetizing—environmental damage.” [10]

A burial mound in Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons, 2023-2025, adobe bricks by Ronald Rael. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

Still, Humeau hopes to resuscitate lost worlds, and Orisons intends to “repair, to welcome the new world forming on the ruins of the old...” [11] The “old” here is history in past tense. The artwork’s perfunctory land acknowledgement (online but not onsite) states that Diné (Navajo), Ute, and other indigenous communities “called the Valley home” and “stewarded” it. [12] Humeau devotes more lines to Colorado’s non-Native settlers, but focuses on the Valley’s spiritual reputation while evading histories of Spanish colonization, Mexican land grants, annexation, railroads, immigration, or the larger agricultural community.

A detail view of Sandhill Crane Song in Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons, 2023-2025, wind and zinc-passivated recycled steel. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

Overlooking the history she invokes, Humeau’s new world is free to be supernatural and “alien.” She claims that “no life really settles [in the Valley], animals come out as fragile visions, holograms…” and that ancient history is a science fiction. Ancestral Puebloans (referred to as “Anasazi” on the onsite map as of September 2) are described as from “a different dimension” and able to “move energy with their thoughts.” [13]

Mythmaking is understandable in the context of Humeau’s existing oeuvre. She is rightfully known for prototyping beautifully speculative, biomorphic forms and installations based in fact, fiction, technology, and prehistoric supposition. But here in the Valley, it is not enough to single handedly attempt remediation, or to “treat the earth as a singular object or a closed, self-regulating system subject to human reparation, management, or both.” [14]

Marguerite Humeau, Russian Thistle Spin in Orisons, 2023-2025, wind, zinc-passivated recycled steel, glass, and hand-carved hardwood. Image by Madeleine Boyson.

There is more than just the “smell of death” here—in Humeau’s words—and the Valley has its own mysticism that doesn’t need to be conjured. [15] As Horton explains, to find accountability with each other and the land in the face of aridification and desertification means to expand our stories, not foreshorten them: “collectively grappling with transborder monsters such as climate change cannot proceed without a thorough political accounting of the entanglement of elite minorities, disenfranchised majorities, and other-than-human persons.” [16] 

My father and I left Orisons after our two allotted hours. When we drove back through the intersection, the hawks were gone. 

Madeleine Boyson (she/her) is an independent writer, curator, lecturer, and artist located in Denver, Colorado. Her scholarship is concentrated American modernism and (dis)ability studies, including issues of care and dependency as well as the wholeness of the body. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and History from the University of Denver.

[1] From www.orisons.art/about.

[2] Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 169.

[3] The artist refers to an Orisons “health report” in Gina Pugliese, “Land Suffering: The Unavailing Amelioration of Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons,” Southwest Contemporary, August 10, 2023, southwestcontemporary.com/marguerite-humeau-orisons/.

[4] Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Cortney Lane Stell, and Marguerite Humeau, “Inside the Cover: Marguerite Humeau,” in CURA 89 (2022): 111, drive.google.com/file/d/1U5uiXkOpBjeh8fI-JX_IEAPEEInNnVX9/view.

[5] The artist quoted in Barbara Urzua, “Meet the Renowned French Artist Bringing Her Work to the San Luis Valley,” 5280: Denver’s Mile High Magazine, July 31, 2023, www.5280.com/renowned-french-artist-brings-work-to-san-luis-valley/.

[6] See these Instagram posts by the artist: www.instagram.com/p/Cw-Kn2HIU7b/ and www.instagram.com/p/CvXi1BKImy4/ as well as Urzua, “Meet the Renowned French Artist.”

[7] The artist quoted in Urzua, “Meet the Renowned French Artist.”

[8] See the artist’s Instagram post, www.instagram.com/p/CvXi1BKImy4/.

[9] Daliah Singer, “A Massive Piece of Land Art is Transforming 160 Acres of Colorado Land,” Condé Nast Traveler, August 1, 2023, https://www.cntraveler.com/story/orisons-by-marguerite-humeau-is-transforming-160-acres-of-colorado-land.

[10] Jessica L. Horton, “Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene, Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 66.

[11] Lamarche-Vadel, “Inside the Cover,” 111.

[12] From orisons.art/the-site, in a paragraph that duplicates the opening sentences of Mark D. Mitchell and Angie Krall’s chapter in The Geology, Ecology, and Human History of the San Luis Valley (Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2020), 301-332.

[13] See the artist’s Instagram post, www.instagram.com/p/Cvhl1VUI42H/. “Anasazi” is a derogatory term meaning “ancient enemy” in Navajo, established in 1927 by an Anglo-American rancher and trader named Richard Wetherill according to the archeological Pecos Classification system. To learn more, visit indianpueblo.org/what-does-anasazi-mean-and-why-is-it-controversial/.

[14] Horton, “Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene,” 53.

[15] The artist quoted in Travis Diehl, “Land Art Today, Beyond Cowboys with Bulldozers,” The New York Times, September 4, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/arts/design/land-art-environment-groundswell-women.html.

[16] Horton, “Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene,” 49.