31 materials to their native element, as performed through a strategy of mimesis. Her collab- orations with the natural environment recall the simultaneous movements of site-specific art and the earthworks of the 1960s by artists such as Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Michael Heizer, among others. These artists aimed to mindfully integrate their work into the land- scape, which allowed not only unrestricted scale but also an expanded definition of sculp- ture. Like many of these artists, Amaral relied on documentation to convey her installation activities in nature, and these artworks survive as conceptual contexts rather than art objects. Interestingly, the artist Isamu Noguchi anticipated the earthworks-as-art movement by more than thirty years, though none of his proposals were realized; for instance, a 1933 proposal titled Monument to the Plow imagined a three-sided pyramid of packed earth measuring 12,000 feet long at the base. 11 Similar to Amaral, Noguchi worked across art and functional design and exemplifies speculative thinking beyond predisposed disciplines and canonical movements. OFF-THE-WALL IDEAS Olga de Amaral acted alongside her peers in the radicalization of art and craft during the mid-twentieth century. However, her emerging sculptural practice occurred in tandem with ongoing commercial endeavors. Amaral (née Ceballos Vélez) met her husband, Jim Amaral, at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and together they established an independent design studio in 1956 that existed for four decades. Jim, a prolific sculptor, created furniture, while Olga created and oversaw the production of rugs and textiles for interiors. In the worlds of craft and design, the overlap of commercial and artistic production is standard, whereas, in the contemporary art world, the construct of Andy Warhol’s Factory is an exemplar of an avant-garde strategy in its unabashed commercial intentionality. Even though Amaral dis- tinguished between the two creative realms, she also saw them as complementary and understood that they informed each other. 12 Her parallel aesthetic explorations across art and design can be seen in her work in fashion in the late 1960s, which primarily took the form of square, color-block dresses. Amaral’s sketches of these garments are stark geo- metric drawings in the vein of the Dutch de Stijl movement, American hard-edge painting, and her fellow Latin American abstractionists (see pp. 15–16 , figs. 3–4). Soon after design- ing and staging runway shows across Colombia, Amaral created fiber works in approximate human scale meant to be experienced in the round, such as Farallón granate (Garnet Rock Ridge) (1973, pp. 56–57). These works take the shape of a slumped body or an empty cocoon, and viewers can recognize their own form in the anthropomorphized structures. The corporeal body of the viewer is also animated in Amaral’s explorations of physical dimension and the activation of space surrounding her artworks, rooted in her background in architecture. Often referred to as her “off-wall” textile works, her early spatial investi- gations can be traced to her exhibition strategies in both domestic and institutional spaces,