How much does it weigh? Does it leak? Does anything grow here?
For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as “The New York Earth Room,” a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria, a lion of Minimalism who died in 2013. And for decades, Mr. Dilworth, an affable abstract artist, patiently fielded those and other questions, noting the more intriguing ones, and the visitors who posed them, in a notebook he kept for that purpose.
“What is this for?” was a recurring question.
His answer: “It’s forever.”
The Earth Room is an extravagant, startling artwork — 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep — on the second floor of an early artists’ co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit. But Mr. Friedrich — who had formed the Dia Art Foundation (now the Dia Center for the Arts) in 1974, with his wife, Philippa de Menil, and others, as an organization dedicated to supporting work like Mr. De Maria’s — decided that “The New York Earth Room” should be one of its showpieces. It opened to the public, free of charge, in 1980.
Since then, the artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved.
“That’s what makes the Earth Room so radical,” Mr. Dilworth said in a video posted on the Dia website. “It’s here, and it remains the same.”
Mr. Dilworth was a bit radical himself: an artist who shunned the art world, but who spent most of his waking hours in one of its most important works.
From the beginning, the Earth Room drew pilgrims, like the woman who visited a few decades ago and would stand silently for a bit and then start to laugh. Or the pre-med student who changed her major to soil studies after her first visit.
People came for the sustenance, whatever that might be, that a roomful of dirt gave them — the quiet of the space; the rich, loamy smell; the incongruity and delight of finding a field of dirt in the middle of the city.
Some wept. Many said it felt like being in church.
Visitors also came to check in with Mr. Dilworth, a quirky, magnetic character — Jessica Morgan, the Dia’s current director, called him the “most present man” she had ever met. He was a draw all on his own.
“The Earth Room’s Bible” was what one visitor called him a few years ago. Abashed, he wrote in his notes that day that he sometimes felt like a curiosity.
He died on Dec. 10 last year at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 70. The cause of his death, which was not widely reported at the time, was a stroke, his wife, Patti, said.
The Dilworths, both artists, met at college in Detroit. They were in their mid-20s when they came to New York in 1979.
One of their first jobs was at “Dream House,” another Dia-funded installation, at the TriBeCa home and performance space of the avant-garde artists La Monte Young, the godfather of Minimalist music, and Marian Zazeela, his wife and collaborator. The Dilworths swept the floors and kept things tidy.
During Mr. Young and Ms. Zazeela’s performances, which lasted for hours and involved repetitions of a single tone and elements of Indian classical music, attendees often fell asleep, and it was the Dilworths’ task to gently rouse them so that they wouldn’t snore. Mr. Dilworth also oversaw the design of Mr. Young’s beard bath, a special sink in which he washed his prodigious facial hair.
“It was all part of the oddball life we’ve lived,” said Ms. Dilworth, who in 1993 became the caretaker of another De Maria work, “The Broken Kilometer,” 500 polished-brass rods laid on the floor of a loft on West Broadway.
The couple developed a routine: Every day at 3 p.m., they closed their installations and met for a walk through the neighborhood, returning to their posts promptly at 3:30.
The Earth Room had a few caretakers before Mr. Dilworth took it on in 1989. But no one was as committed to the mission as he was: He considered the job as urgent as that of a lighthouse keeper.
He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.) The work allowed him, he said, “to settle into the art world in a way that was personal and comfortable and meaningful.”
It also allowed him time to make his own work, which he did in a storage space behind his desk that he turned into a studio. There, he used his sneakered feet instead of a brush to paint sheets of Formica, among other materials, creating paintings that were sensuous and colorful.
“The Earth Room doesn’t hit people the way art usually does,” Mr. Dilworth said in the Dia video. “It’s not what people expect when they go to look at art, and so there’s usually a kind of release that happens, because people are not just moving along with their expectations. They are kind of derailed by it.”
Many visitors looked to him for answers. But as he told the website Artsy in 2016: “I’m in no position to explain it to them, because the artist himself wouldn’t speak about the work. So I’m sort of off the hook. But I am willing to talk around it.”
A reckoning with the earth was how he saw it.
At first, Mr. Dilworth used a clicker to record the number of visitors each day. But then he developed a more creative approach: making a curious curling mark in his notes for each person, using a pen with a thick black edge, like a nib. His tallies are kinetic and quite beautiful, the calligraphy of an unfamiliar language.
“I found the art world to be something that doesn’t appeal to me,” he told Artsy. “This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to it. But making art has been vital to me always. So how do you make art and not be in the art world? This job allows me to stay tuned to my own art-making — just by the freedom of thought and all that.”
William Joseph Dilworth was born on Aug. 29, 1954, in Detroit, one of seven children of Mary Louise (Kaiser) Dilworth and Thomas Dilworth. Hid father was an executive with the United States Gypsum Corporation.
Bill earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1976 from Wayne State University, where he met Patti Haupert. The couple moved to New Haven, Conn., while she earned her master’s degree in fine arts from Yale. They married in 1978.
For years, Mr. Dilworth took care of the clock in the tower at the Church of St. Teresa, which dates to 1842, across the street from his family’s loft on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is the city’s oldest hand-wound tower clock, and each week Mr. Dilworth climbed up the stone tower to wind it. His business cards, which looked like tiny paintings, read, “The Keeper of Earth and Time.”
In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Claire and Mikaela Dilworth; two granddaughters; and six siblings.
Ms. Dilworth retired in 2020; Mr. Dilworth retired last year, in June. He spent a month training Dana Avendano, a soft-spoken 28-year-old artist and Dia employee who had applied for the Earth Room job as his successor, and of whom he heartily approved.
As a parting gift, he gave her a new rake. (Ms. Avendano, at 4-foot-9, needed a tool that fit her.)
“This is what I do,” he told her. “You have to do it your own way. You have to make it your own.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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