Storm King Art Center: Sculpture on the Scale of Mountains
New York
Storm King Art Center sits on five hundred acres of rolling meadow and woodland in the Hudson Highlands, and what happens here is unlike anything you find in a conventional museum. The sculptures are not placed in a landscape. They become part of it.
Ralph Ogden, who had made his fortune in the Star Expansion Company, purchased a one-hundred-and-eighty-acre estate in Mountainville in nineteen fifty-eight and opened it to the public in nineteen sixty. The original plan was modest: a Hudson River School painting museum. But within a year, Ogden and his partner H. Peter Stern had shifted entirely toward modern sculpture, installing large-scale works directly in the grass and on the hillsides. The idea was not to isolate art on pedestals in white rooms but to let it respond to sky, season, and terrain.
The collection's character changed decisively in nineteen sixty-seven when Storm King purchased thirteen works from the estate of sculptor David Smith, who had died two years earlier. Smith's steel constructions, abstract and totemic, looked entirely different outdoors in changing light than they ever had in galleries. The purchase announced that Storm King was doing something new.
Today the collection includes works by Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, Maya Lin, and more than a hundred other artists. Mark di Suvero's monumental orange steel beams appear to defy the physics of their own weight. Richard Serra's curved steel walls create passages and enclosures that change the way a visitor moves through space. Maya Lin's wave field, a hillside of grass mounded into regular undulations, is barely visible as an artwork until you're standing inside it.
The twenty-three hundred acres of Schunnemunk Mountain donated to Storm King protect the viewshed, ensuring that no development crowds the horizon. On a clear day you look up from a sculpture and see the same ridgeline that Hudson River painters studied a hundred and fifty years ago. The art was always part of that view. Storm King just made it official.
