A new winner on the landscape

MATTHEW COOLIDGE, founder of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and a leading figure in the world of anthropogeomorphology (a term he coined), is now also the winner of a major art prize.

Coolidge and the Culver City-based CLUI were named Thursday as winners of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2006 Lucelia Artist Award, a $25,000 prize intended to reward an artist under 50 “who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.”

“It came out of the blue and it’s wonderful,” said Coolidge, 39. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in geography from Boston University, he founded CLUI in 1994. Though he lists many collaborators on its various projects, he is recognized as the presiding spirit behind the center’s more than 30 exhibitions over the last 12 years, from a visual exploration of Los Angeles’ main sewer pipe (“a rare and momentary look at the city’s intestines”) to the postcards of Merle Porter, who died in 1989 after five decades on the road in the West as a one-man postcard company, either snapping images or placing the results for sale at motels, restaurants and souvenir shops.

At the moment, he said, he’s working on an exhibition for CLUI’s Landscape Information Center in Troy, N.Y., a combination of photos, video and text that will examine “the undeveloped cracks and historical anomalies, curiosities, wonders and perplexities of the Hudson River.”

In all these projects, Coolidge has said, the idea is to notice how humankind is interacting with and changing the Earth’s surface -- in short, anthropogeomorphology.

In making their award, the Smithsonian panel of several curators and one artist cited Coolidge’s “new creative strategies,” his focus on land use and his non-polemic approach, suggesting that his work followed in the tradition of the Hudson River school of painters, photographer Ansel Adams and earthworks artist Robert Smithson.

A frequent speaker on landscape-related issues at college campuses, Coolidge is an adjunct professor in the curatorial studies department at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and in 2004 won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

CLUI headquarters stands at 9331 Venice Blvd. in Culver City, neighboring another small, quirky institution beloved by prize juries -- the Museum of Jurassic Technology, whose founder, David Wilson, won a McArthur Genius grant in 2001. Neither award winner claims to be an artist, yet both are frequently classified that way.

Said Coolidge this week: “They’re open to whatever interpretation they want of our work.”

CLUI (www.clui.org) is open from noon to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday or by appointment.

-- Christopher Reynolds