It's not just Robert Smithson's world-famous Spiral Jetty in Utah that's in need of public testimonials about its importance.
South King County is a haven for incredibly little-known works of earth art, including a hill carved by Robert Morris and Herbert Bayer's Earthworks at Mill Creek Canyon in Kent.
Bayer's work, made 25 years ago, is an entire little landscape sculpted into geometric shapes at the base of a canyon with a creek running through it. The water of the creek flows down toward the artwork, and when it reaches the art, the art functions as a water detention dam.
On Thursday, April 24, at 5:00 p.m. (at Kent City Hall Council Chambers, 220 Fourth Ave S), there will be a public hearing on the historical significance of the piece. It's been nominated for City Landmark status.
A landmark designation would help to protect the work from interventions by bureaucrats—and there is one such intervention in the works already. Construction will begin on the site this summer to alter the landscape enough to bring it up to new state flooding codes. The codes involve preparedness for the sort of flood that happens once every 10,000 rather than once every 100 years.
Cheryl dos Remédios, Kent's visual art coordinator, has been working for more than a year on this. She's been trying to see that the alterations to the work are as minimal as possible, and that the piece can still maintain its function, which was crucial to the artist, Bayer, who died in 1985.
To offer alternative options to city engineers, dos Remédios enlisted professor Nancy Rottle and her students in the UW landscape architecture department. Their proposal would have left Bayer's shapes relatively untouched, and provided another outlet for the water by lowering an adjacent parking lot.
But dos Remédios recently found out that the UW option—which she was pushing for—wouldn't cut it, technically. So, alterations to Bayer's shapes will go ahead. Dos Remédios has accepted the solution as fair. "If you presume that you do [need to protect for a once-every-10,000-years storm], this is a very responsible way to address the situation," she said in a phone conversation.
If the artwork becomes a historic landmark, then things might work a little differently next time. "The decision-making process becomes consultative, meaning that—well, I don't think I need to define that," she said. "It would probably get me into trouble."
It's a delicate situation she's handled well since she took the job less than two years ago. Go and testify not only to support Bayer's art, but also to support people like dos Remédios, who fight for art behind the scenes. 
