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The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Quite an upgrade from our porta-potties!' Storm King sculpture park's sublime $53m rebirth
Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York's Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show. 'It's quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,' says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined 'outdoor lobby', while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points. Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park. Storm King now boasts one of the world's greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder's 17-metre tall The Arch stands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride. Mark di Suvero's trio of colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi's 40-tonne granite peach nestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy's drystone wall winds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots. In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature. 'The primary visitor experience was sitting in a long line of traffic and finding somewhere to park your car,' says Claire Weisz of WXY Studio, the architects that have led the project, with Irish firm Heneghan Peng, since 2017. 'We've tried to let the landscape take over again.' Working with New England landscape practice Reed Hilderbrand, and London firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman, the team have torn up over two hectares of asphalt, creating new fields for the display of art, and planted more than 650 trees and shrubs. They have opened up a previously culverted stream, revealing 100 metres of babbling brook, and restored the wetland landscape with sour gum, sweetgum and flowering dogwood, promising a ravishing show of scarlet foliage come the autumn. With much of the tarmac swept away, the colossal outdoor works shine like never before so the new architectural interventions take a back seat, letting the landscape be the real star of the show. Visitors arrive at the newly concentrated 580-space parking lot, where an elegant timber ticket office has been deftly tacked on to the end of a 19th-century stone cottage, shaded by a big projecting canopy. 'It replaces a 1950s garage extension,' says Róisín Heneghan, 'so we made the canopy look like a big open garage door, in a nod to the American garage sale tradition.' The outdoor lobby, framed by tall, shading sweetgum trees, leads to the new bathroom block, where top-lit wooden cubicles snake in a subtle S-curve, crowned with a floating roof that shelters a long open-air concrete sink. The roof appears to be supported by a row of swivelling wooden shutters, which can be closed in the cooler months, or swung open to connect you directly with the wooded wetland beyond. The architects say they were inspired by the outdoor washbasins of Japanese temples, and there is a similar sense of ritual ablution here, a spiritual cleansing in preparation for the aesthetic revelations that await. For once, the American term is fitting: these are restrooms where you might indeed want to rest awhile, take in the view, and enjoy the aroma of the allspice shrubs, planted, says Beka Sturges of Reed Hilderbrand, 'as a celebration of sanitation'. Sturges says her firm is often accused of being too deferential, but here that's exactly what was needed. Their work is almost invisible: few visitors will remember the previous nightmare of car parks, or realise that a long allée of dying maples has been replaced with more resilient tupelo trees, or that new ground-cover and perennials were selected for their climate resilience. 'We've tried to interlace a few southern species, where this would be the northern edge of their historic range,' says Sturges, 'just to try to get ahead of the terrifying change to climate.' There has also been a lot of work behind the scenes, which most visitors will never see. A new southern logistics entrance means that delivery trucks and maintenance vehicles no longer have to ply their way across the park, disturbing visitors' reverie. It leads to a new conservation, fabrication and maintenance building, conceived as a big black hangar, cut into a sloping hillside. Here, beneath the six-metre high ceilings, cooled by Big Ass Fans, sculptures can be repaired and repainted in a 15-metre long spray booth, before being wheeled out through full-height doors. It means that work that used to have to be outsourced, entailing more truck deliveries, can now be done on site, while the action can be surveyed from mezzanine offices overhead. It is where the big steel buttresses for a new temporary installation by Kevin Beasley were fabricated, which now stand on Tippet's Field – a prominent new space reclaimed from one of the bigger parking lots – forming a 30-metre long theatre arch of found fabrics suspended in resin. Beasley plans to activate the work with performances this summer, the first test of this grassy stage as a canvas for whatever the next generation of artists will dream up. As Lawrence puts it: 'It's quite unusual for an artist to be told, 'Here's a huge landscape, go to town!'' And that's where Storm King's magic lies – now with more potential than ever.
Forbes
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Kevin Beasley's Colossal Sculpture Inaugurates Storm King Art Center's Tippetts Field, Transformed From A Parking Lot
Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection , 2024 – ... More 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Photo by Jef frey Jenkins Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Rebirth , 2024 – 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins As the rain cleared on Saturday afternoon, light poured through the spaces between each triptych panel of the towering tetraptych sculpture crafted from cast-resin slabs to represent the four seasons. Viewing from a distance in the South Fields of Storm King Art Center , it was unclear what mediums were used to create an array of colorful swatches. As visitors approached, they examined the thickly layered articles of clothing (promotional graphic T-shirts, patterned dresses, children's pants with adjustable elastic waists, sourced from thrift shops, friends, and the artist's own wardrobe), along with farm tools, plants, and seeds. On the reverse, the seasons are represented with imagery evoking the moods of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Viewers navigate the noticeable shifts in weather patterns, plant life, and animal behavior, and how those changes impact our emotions. The installation took over a former parking lot, exemplifying Storm King's mission of marrying landscape and art. The slender openings between each triptych frame of the quadriptych reveal the rolling hills, verdant fields, and woodlands, drawing us even closer to the monumental installation and underscoring the poetic alliance of sculpture and landscape that defines the ethos of Storm King. Kevin Beasley 's site-specific installation ROSCENIUM | Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection (2024–25) inaugurates Storm King's Tippetts Field, which transforms a parking lot into an interactive, immersive art space. Beasley's largest work to date, sprawling 100 feet wide and soaring 11 feet tall, compels us to reconsider our place in the universe. 'These bright batches of color are actually individual garments that are pressed together into these panels. All of the clothing is saturated in a UV resistant resin, and then they're placed into these frames. What we're seeing is the top layer of a process that starts on the other side,' Storm King Director of Learning & Engagement Hannah des Cognets told a small group tour. 'There's a layer of resin, there's some mark-making, which we'll see on the other side, and then these layers of saturated clothing are laid on the top. It's compressed and then baked in an oven to cure the resin. The other thing to point out from this angle are these big buttresses, which are part of a formal reference to acoustic mirrors, which is an early technology used in World War I focusing sound and detecting approaching ships or planes. … Kevin is referencing that form, both with these buttresses and with the curve. … You'll notice some interesting things happening with sound when we come around the front side.' Before the invention of radar, parabolic sound mirrors were used experimentally as early-warning devices by military air defense forces to detect incoming enemy aircraft by listening for the sound of their engines. Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection , 2024 – ... More 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Photo by Jef frey Jenkins Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Rebirth , 2024 – 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins Beasley (b. Lynchburg, Va, 1985) examines the magnitude of myriad environmental, cultural, and political facets of the American landscape, an inquiry that resonates deeply with visitors at Storm King. His singular process includes rendering each scene with gestural marks in resin, Sharpie, and various casting techniques. The effect is a richly-layered artwork, where the range of textures amplify the multi-seasonal narrative. A close inspection of the sides of each frame evokes the varied topography, offering glimpses into the breadth of collected materials comprising stratification. As the title suggests, the installation's curved form borrows from proscenium staging, which originated in open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome. The term originally referred to the row of columns at the front of the skene (scene building), supporting a raised acting platform, and later expanded to encompass the area in front of the stage where the actors performed. Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Harvest , 2024 – 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and ... More Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins JEFFREY JENKINS Not only is Beasley's work itself performative as it invites multiple interpretations, his artistic practice incorporates sound and performance to convey the histories and lived experiences embedded in the American landscape. Beasley's family has owned land in Valentines, Virginia, for over a century, and his work reflects on stewardship, farming, and the legacies of colonialism. His engagement with the landscape at Storm King opens a complicated dialogue with the Hudson River School, a mid-19th-century American art movement that celebrated the beauty and spirituality of the American landscape, particularly the Hudson River Valley. 'Landscape is a word to ask questions around,' says Beasley. 'For some folks it means freedom, and for others it means something you can't access . . . [it] tells a deep story and speaks in ways that encourage us to absorb experiences.' Beasley will activate the exhibition with a collaborative performance, Growth: The Watch , on Saturday, July 19, and Sunday, July 20. Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Harvest , 2024 – 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and ... More Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins Kevin Beasley, PROSCENIUM| Harvest (detail), 2024 – 25. Courtesy the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins Photo by JEFFREY JENKINS The exhibition is organized by Storm King Executive Director Nora Lawrence and Associate Curator Eric Booker, with Assistant Curator Adela Goldsmith. An opening reception on Saturday celebrated the 2025 Exhibitions by Beasley, Brazilian contemporary artist Sonia Gomes (co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah, co-founder of Art Noir) , and American photographer Dionne Lee , as well as a major capital redesign project which invites more sculpture to collaborate with the landscape. 'We have a graceful and beautiful entry to Storm King with an environmentally conscious design, a group canopy, a ticket pavilion and a really gorgeous restroom,' said Lawrence. 'On the way out, the creation of this beautiful pavilion allowed us to reclaim two large parking lots, five acres of land for nature and art, one in our North Meadow and the other Tippetts Field right outside here, which both used to be parking lots. The unparalleled spaces that Storm King provides for the display of sculpture have met their match in a new building that we have devoted to that same artworks' care.' This exhibition is made possible with major support by Roberta and Steven Denning, the Hazen Polsky Foundation, and the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, with lead support by Janet Benton and David Schunter, Jennifer Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Agnes Gund, Lipman Family Foundation, and Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust, with support also provided by Regen Projects and supported in part by Candace Carmel Barasch, Allison and Larry Berg, and Girlfriend Fund. This project is supported through a Market New York grant awarded by Empire State Development, and I LOVE NY, New York State's Division of Tourism.
