With its roots in avant-garde arts and the stubbornly resilient transcendentalism of American nature-worship, the environmental art movement flourished from the 1960s to the 1980s. Its most significant precedent was the radical artistic experimentation of the artists at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s and 1950s, including John Cage's experiments with the boundaries between sound and noise, Robert Rauschenberg's monochromatic White and Black paintings, and the performance pieces of Merce Cunningham. Reflecting their reaction to purist theories of modernism espoused by critics and artists of their generation, these artists sought to both delineate and blur the lines between art and nonart, between the human-fabricated and the natural environment, and between the artist and the audience as participants in the making of art and artistic meaning. Brought back to New York City in the 1960s, this ethos fueled new movements in the arts, including most notably Fluxus…