‘Landscape with Path’

New York City is miles from vast expanses of nature. But locals and tourists can get a glimpse of the open plain thanks to a 25-by-75-foot billboard bearing Robert Adams’s Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County—an image that shows a ribbon of paved but weathered two-lane highway, bordered by prairie and a relatively unobscured horizon. Providing city folk with a rustic visual escape, the image is the second installment in Landscape with Path. The exhibition is curated by local photographer Joel Sternfeld and is in inverse contrast to the High Line’s newfound functionality as a streak of usable natural landscape in an urban environment. Taken in 1978, the image is part of Adams’s survey of how human development has shaped the landscape of the western United States. It now stands on view east of the High Line at West 18th Street in New York. Through October 2011. • thehighline.org