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.