EXPLORE LANDMARKS WITH OUR GEOCACHING SCAVENGER HUNT!
Calling all Geocachers! Experience Landmarks collection with our Geocaching Scavenger Hunt! Not sure what Geocaching is? Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunt that uses GPS-enabled devices such as smartphones. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.
Landmarks’ adventure includes a total of 11 geocaches for you to find, all placed around outdoor works of art in our collection. Find one or eleven; it’s up to you! As you move around campus on your search, you’ll also learn about modern and contemporary art by some of the most admired artists of our time.
The caches are small and may be hidden in unexpected places. However, none are attached to the works of art, so please do not touch the sculptures or their bases. Also, bring a phone to "log" the caches you discover. Once you find a cache, scan the QR code attached and sign in on the online form.
To make things more interesting, followers who find all 11 geocaches will win prizes! Upload photos of yourself to social media with the caches you’ve found, tag Landmarks, and add the hashtag #LandmarksGeocache to your post.
If you want to be super precise with your hunting, see the coordinates below. These will get you as close to the exact location of the caches as possible, but just searching near the art works as well. You can download a simple GPS app on your phone to utilize the coordinates. Something to note: Parking is sometimes difficult on campus, so we encourage you to consider biking, walking, or taking public transportation if possible.
If you need a hint, drag your mouse and highlight the space after the hint. The highlighted text will reveal a hidden message to help you find the cache.
Here is where all the caches are located! Happy Hunting!
Artwork Location: Health Learning Building Courtyard
Geocache Coordinates: N 30° 16.543 W 097° 44.011
In his sculptural series The Archaeology of Art, Marc Quinn creates monumental forms from seashells. Spiral of the Galaxy is based on a conch in the collection of the British Natural History Museum. For Quinn’s work, the conch was scanned in three dimensions, then a mold was created and cast into bronze. The resulting figure is familiar in its proportion and surfaces, but strange because it no longer invites intimate handling. Its altered material and scale transform it into a solid, architectural form that occupies public space and affects the urban ecosystem.
Artwork Location: Fine Arts Complex on Trinity Street
Geocache Coordinates: N 30° 17.222 W 097° 43.916
Considered one of the principal theorists and practitioners of Minimalist art, Tony Smith achieved a unique vitality in his sculptures. Amaryllis demonstrates Smith’s ability to combine basic modules into an asymmetrical linear arrangement that activates the space it inhabits. As a viewer walks around the work, different configurations emerge and recede; the two stacked polyhedrons can appear flattened or neutralized, firmly grounded or imbalanced. Smith’s complex modules effectively combine elements from primitive and modern architecture, mathematics, and science.
In the 1960s, Magdalena Abakanowicz began working with natural fibers, creating weavings of flax, hemp, horsehair, sisal, and wool. Figure on a Trunk features a lone human form presented on a stage of sorts, as if for our approval, judgment, or condemnation. The headless personage appears to be a hollowed-out husk—a mere shell, emptied of life and energy. The bench on which the figure stands seems stable, yet it rests on two logs that could roll out from underneath, suggesting a precarious balance. A powerful expression of the human condition, Abakanowicz’s sculpture is at once personal and universal, an effigy waiting passively for change and completion.
Mark DiSuvero’s heroic sculpture Clock Knot exemplifies the power of art to transform public locations. Walking around the work produces constantly changing views, and moving under it offers another experience of the sculpture and its space. The crossed I-beams and circular “knotted” center of Clock Knot suggest a giant clock face with a horizontal “hand” extending to the left. But as one moves around the sculpture, what had been read as a vertical beam shows itself to be one leg of an inverted V-form. Is it a clock or not/knot? Clock Knot is a work of poetry and power. As visitors pass through its space looking at the sky and feeling the exuberant lift of the sculpture, their imaginations will play with its visual and verbal suggestions.
Learn more about Clock Knothere or listen to an audio guide here.
Artwork Location: Northwest corner of 24th Street and Speedway
Geocache Coordinates: N 30° 17.255 W 097° 44.224
Balancing with improbable grace, Monochrome for Austin boasts seventy recycled aluminum canoes and small boats clustered at the end of a listing column. It deploys a sense of mass and scale that can be compared to a performer’s perfect timing, a characteristic that is ever-present in the work of artist Nancy Rubins. Her sculptures combine surpassing delicacy and indomitable strength, a polarity that is even more striking when encountered outdoors.
Learn more about Monochrome for Austinhere or listen to an audio guide here.
Artwork Location: Speedway entrance to The Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex & Dell Computer Science Hall (GDC)
Geocache Coordinates: N 30° 17.177 W 097° 44.216
Sol LeWitt’s Circle with Towers is, in effect, a low circular wall capped at regular intervals by eight rectangular towers made of pale gray concrete blocks. The outdoor structure possesses a discernable logic and rhythm: the concrete towers are four blocks wide while the low walls between them are eight blocks wide—a perfect 1:2 ratio. Like many of LeWitt’s works, Circle with Towers demonstrates the artist’s generosity in welcoming others to interpret his work, including the artists and craftspeople who realize his artistic visions.
Learn more about Circle with Towershere or listen to an audio guide here.
Square Tilt typifies Joel Perlman’s best-known compositions, which suggest portals or gateways: a square or rectangular frame surrounding a large opening. The sculpture functions as a window in any setting, offering viewers the opportunity to see through a physical and metaphoric portal. Seen indoors against a blank wall, the work invites appreciation of its abstract vivacity. In other settings, especially outdoors, the large central opening incorporates its environment. Small rectangles of steel are attached to the frame, introducing a harmonic interplay of forms. Despite its considerable size, Square Tilt conveys an impression of airy weightlessness.
Learn more about Square Tilthere or listen to an audio guide here.
While Eleanor at 7:15 resists a figurative interpretation, the title alludes to an intimate moment in the life of the artist. Willard Boepple’s titles are not meant to be descriptions or explanations. They are inspired by places or poetry that evoke a feeling or gesture. With Eleanor at 7:15, Boepple envisioned a lively and energetic morning person. Aesthetically, the piece adheres to the formalist ideas that drove abstract sculpture at that time, when the context behind a work of art was secondary to purely visual aspects like form and style. Beopple breaks from this tradition by suggesting a narrative within the title.
Artwork Location: East of COM on Inner Campus Drive
Geocache Coordinates: N 30° 17.136 W 097° 44.289
A certain conversation starter, Donald Lipski’s The West combines items that offer visual allusions, inviting the viewer to engage in the mental work of supposing. For some, the title of the piece implies unchartered territory, while the suggestive shape of the buoys hints at the brut force and energy that is needed to conquer the unknown. The pennies attached to the surface of the sculpture—heads on one buoy and tails on the other—suggest the odds of a great gamble. Like much of Lipski’s sculpture, understanding The West is similar to teasing apart a poem—multiple meanings can be coaxed out and revealed over time.
Learn more about The Westhere or listen to an audio guide here.
Despite the weight and unwieldiness of industrially produced steel, Anthony Caro composed his works spontaneously, without preliminary drawings or models. In this sense, his sculptures are sometimes considered three-dimensional equivalents of gestural drawings. Caro used sheets of steel as if they were sheets of paper: cutting, tearing, and folding them like three-dimensional collages on a large scale. In 1972, and again in 1973, Caro worked at the Rigamonte factory in Veduggio, Italy. He used steel remnants from the factory's scrap yard to assemble fourteen sculptures. Despite the title’s reference to the place at which it was made and the suggestion that the form resembles a landscape, Veduggio Glimpse is a purely abstract work intended to be appreciated for its visual qualities.
Sentinel IVis a slender bronze guardian. In using the term “sentinel”—a person or thing that stands watch—Leigh honors Black femininity while also investigating historical and intersecting ideas of race, beauty, and the association of Black women’s bodies with work. Sited in the central courtyard of the Anna Hiss Gymnasium, Sentinel IV stakes radical claim to existence in a moment when Black existence, in particular, is persistently under threat. It holds space and holds court—an apt landmark poised to see, hear, and represent—to project Black presence into the future of The University of Texas at Austin and beyond, bearing witness to this indelible present.
