Why did it take so long? And how did a trailblazer like Denes, whose most flamboyant work was easily accessible to millions of New Yorkers, fade from view? Maybe “Wheatfield” was just too ephemeral; it wasn’t a triumph of heavy equipment over dirt like the best-known earthworks of the day, but a meditation on the tension between the man-made and the natural. It was also an experiment in urban farming that was a solid 30 years ahead of its time. Denes had a lot working against her: She was an artist whose signature work existed for only three months; a woman — and, in her early 50s at the time of “Wheatfield,” not even a young woman — whose peers in the earthworks movement were defined by their heedless machismo; and a conceptual artist with huge ideas at a time when galleries and museums were more interested in the bright canvases of the Neo-Expressionists. At long last, time has caught up with her, and the very things that cut her off from the mainstream — her boldness, her theoretical concerns — have made her, and especially her “Wheatfield” project, more necessary than ever.

DENES, 87, WAS born in Budapest and has lived in the same loft, just below Houston Street, since 1980. Her home is a throwback to an earlier SoHo, more like a warehouse than a living space, crammed with her artwork. There are pieces in almost every possible medium, tracing Denes’s free-ranging exploration of math, science and the nature of the universe.