James Turrell's Annus Mirabilis

This is James Turrell’s big year! Starting this spring, a trilogy of Turrell retrospectives will appear across the country-- at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles’s LACMA, and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In addition, there have been recent gallery shows and visits planned to the Roden Crater project. And, as a lagniappe, there’s a pictorially splashy piece on the numerous “sky spaces” Turrell has constructed for private patrons in the May 12 issue of the New York Times Style magazine.   On the festive occasion of all the above, I will reprint in a subsequent post a long article I wrote after seeing James Turrell’s 1980-81 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York-- his first and only New York museum exhibition before the forthcoming Guggenheim show (though there have been many elsewhere). My article appeared in the May 1981 issue of Art in America magazine. The initial sections were devoted to the art-political context-- both in California and the broader art world-- in which Turrell’s work first appeared. The last sections treated the installations exhibited at the Whitney.

MOMA the Destroyer?

The former American Folk Art Museum building. New York City 1997-2001, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Photo Giles Ashford.

We're not talking about the latest bizarre horror movie. The villain is New York's own Museum of Modern Art and its proposed plan to raze Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's 53rd Street building, a striking structure which formerly housed the American Folk Art Museum. The plan has provoked volleys of criticism from architects, preservationists, ordinary citizens, and serious architecture critics. (See Martin Filler's acerbic article in the May 23, 2013 issue of the New York Review of Books.) If MOMA goes ahead with the ill-advised destruction project, it would be committing cultural vandalism. And this horror would occur in real life-- not on the silver screen.

Perhaps responding to the protests, MOMA announced yesterday (May 9) that it would reconsider its plans. But as Robin Pogrebin reports in the New York Times, anonymous insiders say that the museum is still likely to go ahead with the destruction. We await MOMA's final decision and can only hope for the best.