Walter De Maria is hailed for his minimal installations and conceptual land art from the late 1970s, including The Lightening Field and The New York Earth Room. De Maria began his engagement with art in the 1950s when he befriended La Monte Young in San Francisco and participated in the burgeoning scene. He participated in Happenings, and began making sculptures that assigned each viewer a task, often including moving or touching items for the sake of altering their position. He moved to New York City in 1960 and began working with manufactured materials like stainless steel and aluminum. Inspired by Dada and constructivism, these minimal artworks were often site specific. Utilizing repetition or mathematical absolutes, the viewer finds themselves in balanced, even sublime, scenarios in which materials interact with their environment and reveal the potential of the invisible. His elaborate works—such as filling a room in SoHo with dirt, or burying a one-kilometer-long rod in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel—sought out a psychic experience that might spur a metaphysical epiphany.

De Maria was included in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and When Attitude Becomes Form at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, two seminal exhibitions for Minimalist and Conceptual artists working in the 1960s. His work was also on view at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, the Menil Museum, Houston, Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima, Japan, Fondazione Prada, Milan, and Kunstmuseum Zurich, among others. Eleven of his permanent, commissioned sculptures can be found in locations around the world including Munich and Paris, among others.