NEW YORK, NY.- Leila Heller Gallery is presenting Time To Hit The Road, a group exhibition curated by Alex Gerson and Matteo Zevi. This is the first show in New York City featuring works by artists who participated in Gerson and Zevi’s Land Art Road Trip residency in the summers of 2013 and 2014. This trip is a traveling, immersive, residency program exploring works by pioneering Land Artists throughout the Southwestern United States. In recognition of the cultural richness and creative spirit of the “Land of Enchantment,” a portion of all the show’s proceeds will benefit the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.

Time to Hit the Road is the culmination of a great, collaborative adventure, reflecting the experiences of dozens of artists who participated in the Gerson Zevi Land Art Road Trip. Over the last two years, more than sixty young artists participated in this exploration of the open road, learning new things about themselves and about the world around them. Now, for the first time, their work will be displayed in a group show at Leila Heller Gallery in New York City. Here, thousands of miles from the dirt roads and dusty cliffs of the desert, this remarkable group comes together once again to show how the creative journey has inspired their artistic practice.

In the summers of 2013 and 2014, these artists spent up to a month at a time traveling together across the Southwest, exploring iconic works of land art by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Walter de Maria. Much like the artists whose works they visited, these new explorers spent days at a time outdoors, in close contact with the works, nature, each other, and little else. Retracing these steps, these road trips exposed this group of artists to life-­‐changing, defining experiences, continuing the legacy of pioneering Land Artists who took their practice beyond the confines of traditional studio or gallery settings.

Time to Hit the Road, curated by Alex Gerson and Matteo Zevi, the leaders of the Land Art Road Trip, is an exploration of these shared experiences, and the ways in which this group of artists have created and maintained creative dialogues amongst each other. Following their sharp exposure to the myriad physical and conceptual dialogues generated by these trips, most of the artists did not return to their lives in isolation. Rather, they found their practices, their relationships, and their thoughts drawn into dialogues, between themselves and with the journey they had undertaken. In this show, many of these discourses are revealed, along with the wide variety of creative expressions that have resulted.