70. Ring of Sulphur and Asphalt, Texas (never built), 1972

The De Menil Foundation of Houston, Texas, sponsored in 1968 "Visionary Architects: Boulée, Ledoux, Lequeu,” an exhibition held at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Because of the success of this exhibition, the Foundation planned to continue the theme of visionary architecture into the modern period, with an emphasis on Earth artists such as Robert Smithson. Although the second exhibition was never realized, it did give Smithson the opportunity to conceive an appropriate project.

Smithson made several drawings of projects incorporating the huge chunks of bright yellow sulphur he knew to exist in the Houston area. The most elaborate was Ring of Sulphur and Asphalt (proposed diameter 200'), which consisted actually of three concentric rings, a central one of asphalt bounded on both sides by those of sulphur. A variation was his idea for a 300-foot-diameter ring of sulphur 15 feet wide to be built on a flat plain.

Smithson's interest in the sulphur at Rosenberg, Texas, near Houston predates plans for the visionary architecture show. In 1970 he planned at Northwood an alternate version of his Texas Overflow using sulphur. That same year he dreamed of an Island of Sulphur formed by routing barges in the Gulf of Mexico from Texas City to Mose Lake and Dollar Bay. At the same time he also attempted Barge of Sulphur which would consist of shipping Texas sulphur through the Panama Canal to California.

An artist whose ideas continually outdistanced opportunities for their realization, Smithson also contemplated a movie treatment of Ring of Sulphur (similar to his proposal for a film entitled Panama Passage), in which he envisaged taking shots of mining sulphur as well as of the convoy transporting the material to the site The records for this film are fragmentary but do contain intriguing clues to its intended range, including a proposal for a shot of praying mantises mating.

(Hobbs, Robert Carleton. Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Cornell University Press, 1981)