This month’s Cover Story features an extraordinary photograph taken on 20 September 1973, during the inauguration of Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. In just a few decades, this site evolved from prairie and ranchland to become the world’s second-busiest airport. Though the identities of the photographer and the young cowboy in the image remain unknown, the iconic delta-winged airplane on the left is unmistakable: this was Concorde’s first visit to the U.S. on a promotional journey prior to the start of scheduled passenger flights in 1976. Arriving from Caracas and departing for Washington Dulles, the supersonic crystalline jet symbolized the futuristic height of jet-set speed, glamour, and exclusivity, two decades before budget airlines made air travel almost mundane. Meanwhile the opening of Dallas-Fort Worth itself, designed as a new breed of hub to accommodate large, long-range wide-body airliners like the Boeing 747, marked a transformative moment in airport scale and capacity.

Artist Robert Smithson’s prescient collaboration with one of the architectural teams behind Dallas-Fort Worth took place precisely at this conceptual crossroads of expansion in the meaning of flying. Eerily, Smithson’s untimely death in a light aircraft crash elsewhere in Texas had occurred exactly two months to the day before this Concorde photograph was captured.

Invited by the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Scholarly Text Program, Max Andrews of Latitudes chose to write on Smithson’s 1969 essay “Aerial Art,” originally published in Studio International. In this text, Smithson outlined his earthwork proposals for the airport site, alongside works proposed by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt. Max’s essay delves into this historical moment, tracing the allied rise of air travel and global art networks while highlighting the multi-decade surge in carbon emissions from flying and its significant impact on the climate crisis.

The Scholarly Text Program regularly commissions essays focused on individual artworks by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, exploring the continued relevance of their ideas across contemporary artistic and cultural production—from geology and ecology to poetry and beyond. Also available is Mariana Cánepa Luna’s recently published essay on Nancy Holt’s site-responsive installation “Ventilation System”, commissioned for this same program.