![]() ![]() The Skyspace will transform the Henry's nighttime face from staid to glamorous. ![]() It's almost as if the Turrell installation, conceived last year, were intended for that place all along. That original entryway was left high and dry, an empty architectural feature, after the Henry's remodeling was completed in 1997. To celebrate the museum's 75th anniversary, the Henry has commissioned a permanent Turrell "Skyspace," an elliptical sky-viewing room that hovers on twin pillars, 11 feet above the outdoor sculpture court, and will be entered through the Henry's beautiful old beaux-arts doorway. When "Knowing Light" opens, visitors will also encounter a major Turrell work in progress. The Henry's south galleries have been closed to the public for the past six weeks during construction. The exhibition required building a new floor, ceiling, interior walls, a stairway and wheelchair ramp inside the space. Topping it off is an entire room of models, drawings and photographs of the Roden Crater project, geared to help people grasp the complexities of the hard-to-describe earthwork. The show opens Saturday at the Henry Art Gallery and includes three new installations that reconfigure the museum's entire south gallery into several jaw-dropping encounters with light. Yet even Turrell's more manageable projects end up being huge undertakings, as the exhibit "James Turrell: Knowing Light" makes clear. The Roden Crater promises to be one of the most astonishing - and ambitious - works of art of our time, a modern temple to the sun, moon and stars. The first phases of the project are slated to open to the public next year. Turrell makes art out of intangibles - ideas and light - and most of those ideas need to play out on a grand stage.įor the past 25 years, Turrell has channeled much of his time, energy and money into the Roden Crater project, a network of tunnels and light chambers built within an extinct volcano in Northern Arizona. ![]() He's not the kind of artist who simply builds work in his studio and trucks it to the gallery for a show. It takes an extraordinary commitment of time, space and money for a museum to produce a James Turrell exhibit. ![]()
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