So when I was a kid growing up in our house, we had a large photograph of the Spiral Jetty
hanging in our house for as long as I can remember.
It was a photo that my dad loved and that my mom didn't love quite so much.
And it wasn't until I went to college and I was in an art history class, and opened
my art history textbook and saw the photo that was hanging in our family room for years
and years and years...
Yeah.
that I went to my dad and said, "This is kind of a big deal, Dad."
And when I showed him that, he went into his closet and took out a folder full of materials
like this.
Apparently four or five different contractors passed on the job because they didn't want
to take their equipment out to the Great Salt Lake for fear of damaging it.
He was the first one who accepted the job from Robert Smithson.
He worked in construction for decades and built practical things -- roads, gas lines,
things like that.
But for whatever reason, I think this was special enough to him or weird enough to him
that he kept everything.
He would tell stories all the time about how Smithson was very particular about going down
with these big wooden lathes and then climbing back up the hill to look at where rocks were
being placed.
He was very particular, apparently, about the way it was constructed.
What we have here is the contract that your father had with Smithson.
And there was some additional work?
Yeah, originally, as you can see on some of the sketches here, it was like a big "J" with
an island in the middle.
And after the project was completed, Smithson came back to my dad and said, "It's not quite
right, it needs to be changed."
And so he requested that it be turned into more of a spiral.
They did an additional change order for that that was $3,000 additional.
The thing about Spiral Jetty is soon after it was made, the water levels had risen.
You couldn't see it until the early 2000s, when a drought lowered the lake.
And now it's become a pilgrimage spot for land artists, Utahans.
It's kind of become a symbol of Utah, hasn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's definitely a very special place for my family.
We went out there just recently, all together as a group, and the water level has receded
so far that it's easy to just walk out, all the way out, surrounding where the jetty is.
Smithson was born in 1938 and he died in 1973 in a plane crash while surveying Amarillo
Ramp, only three years later.
So what you have here are a variety of drawings with a variety of different detail.
This one is a more general piece, and this is the second version of the Spiral Jetty,
I would take it.
This work has more of the landscape surrounding it.
This one has some red pencil as well.
The red is my dad doing drawings and diagrams to sort of explain how things could actually
be built.
So the importance of having the proposal and having the photograph that was autographed
to your father is that it authenticates the drawings, because the drawings themselves
are unsigned.
There are records of drawings of Spiral Jetty coming up and selling.
There's a wide range.
Works of this quality with all of the detail, so this work and the work in the center here,
I would value at about $15,000 each, conservatively, in a retail gallery.
I would think that this would be more like $10,000 in a retail gallery.
And this one, which shows the first version and the second version, I would say would
probably be about $7,500.
Wow.
So the collection altogether is $47,500.
That's pretty staggering.
I mean that... that really would have delighted my dad.
He passed away just earlier this year, and I... he probably... he would have been delighted
just to have the work shown.