[title]
There’s nothing like a sweltering heat wave to awaken a desire to get out of the city, and there are few day trips more beautiful and rewarding than a visit to the Hudson Valley’s Storm King Art Center. The outdoor museum boasts 500 acres of rolling hills, wide-open blue skies and massive sculptures by celebrated contemporary artists.
This season, three new thoughtful special exhibitions join the renowned landscape, offering meditations on history and nature that play with the ways the past brushes against both our present and future.
Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud brings visitors to a fictional archaeological dig site, where tall, acrylic columns filled with organic materials emerge from a shallow pool, like an ecological monument left by an unknown society.
Using a soil science technique developed in the 1880s, Yi combined soil with water from the museum’s South Ponds within the pillars to create habitats for algae and microbial colonies to grow. The result is verdant layers of rich greens and browns that will change over the course of the exhibition’s run as they are exposed to the sun and elements. As you walk around the site, be sure to look beneath your feet to find more evidence of Yi’s “biofiction”: concrete engravings of imagined technological fossils inspired by the artist’s Precambrian Panels (2024).
Yi’s fascination with the distant past, both real and imagined, is further crystallized in Before Skeletons, Before Teeth, a “prehistoric culinary experience” conceived by the artist in collaboration with Care of Chan that will be open to the public for one day only on June 27. The centerpiece of the menu is the Stone Altar, a banquet table covered with lush canapés of cascading rocks and pebbles that are actually chocolate, decadent butter mounds covered in edible flowers, cheeses that resemble (delicious) fungi, and jars of layered trifles that mirror the columns in Yi’s installation. I had a chance to preview the experience at the season’s opening celebration, and I found the altar’s bounty to be as sumptuous as it was splendid. The rich, pleasantly salty, earthy food also pairs perfectly with the sharp, bright tartness of the “Pond Water” cocktail, which combines ramp-infused spirits with celery juice, maple syrup and apple cider vinegar.
In another field, artist Liz Glynn drew from a much more terrestrial—and urban—historical inspiration. Glynn used photos of the Gilded Age financier William C. Whitney’s Fifth Avenue mansion to reconstruct the home’s ornate ballroom furniture in concrete for Open House. Glynn rendered the intricate details of the Louis XIV–style pieces so faithfully that, from a distance, the armchairs and footstools almost look as if they are made from a softer, more luxurious material, but, alas, the concrete is hard to sit on (which you are invited to try for yourself). It feels a bit surreal to step through the massive, arched windows and trudge through the grass past a flock of geese to lounge on the couches, but is it really any more absurd than the staggering wealth inequality that led to the original ballroom’s existence?
Lastly, an ancient fish-out-of-water is placed just right on Museum Hill with Saif Azzuz’s weych-pues / tàkhòne (where the rivers meet), which is part of Storm King’s Outlooks series spotlighting emerging and mid-career artists. Using steel, aluminum and salvaged car parts from the Hudson Valley, Azzuz created a large sculpture of a sturgeon, a fish that is significant in the diets and traditions of various Native American tribes, including the Lenape, who were forcibly removed from the area. Azzuz, a member of the Yurok tribe, drew inspiration from his own culture and history for this work. If you closely examine the sturgeon, you’ll find text and images from nature—flying birds, fir trees and native plants—etched into the side, offering a bigger story to explore and consider.
If we continue to get more extreme swings in weather this spring, don’t fret. All three exhibitions are on view through November 7, so there should be time to book it up north before then.
Storm King Art Center is open Wednesday through Monday from 10am to 6pm and admission costs $25, seniors $22, youth (5-17) and students $15. You can get there from Manhattan via round-trip Coach USA bus rides from Port Authority, or by taking a rideshare from Beacon via the Metro North train or from Salisbury Mills-Cornwall via NJ Transit train.