Though Storm King Art Center opened to the public in 1960, I first heard of it around 1967, about the time its collection of contemporary sculpture burst beyond the lawns adjoining the small (by Storm King standards) Museum Building and spread into the open Hudson highland landscapes surrounding the museum. By then, I was in college in Massachusetts, and though I drove by Storm King Mountain at times on Route 9W east of the center or occasionally glimpsed a sculpture from the New York State Thruway west of it, I never got around to visiting the Art Center—until now.

We spent a full day, 7½ hours, at the Art Center. We would need at least another half-day to experience everything currently on display. And even that would be just one experience, on two days in one season of one year. I grew up hiking and camping in these hills and mountains; you don’t just “see” the landscapes and vistas of the Hudson Valley, you feel them with all your senses as you climb and descend, traverse meadows and wooded hills, all the while being touched by sun and weather. At Storm King, you can experience the art similarly if you leave your car and walk out and around the large pieces in the Meadows and the South Fields or catch changing perspectives on the smaller pieces installed in the North Woods and on Museum Hill.

As we navigated the diverse sections of the 1,100-acre exhibit space, I noted the dates when pieces were created and installed. I could feel (with all those senses!) how the center has grown and evolved in its purpose of marrying human-created three-dimensional art (a.k.a. “sculpture”) with natural landscapes. The marriage (actually many marriages, one for each work) succeeds. And for most of these creations, you need to feel them in four dimensions; you need to walk around them, move closer and then step backward to gain distance, experience them as a flowing set of perspectives integrated through time as well as in space.

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(Above) Two views of Mother Peace (1969-1970) by Mark Di Suvero

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(Above) Suspended (1977) by Menashe Kadishman, viewed from the hills west and east of it. There is nothing else aboveground holding the sculpture in place other than the two blocks you see.

This fall, Storm King has 10 works by the American artist Mark Di Suvero installed in the South Fields. They are large works (see the photos here and in Jennifer’s post on Storm King; Di Suvero uses cranes and cherry picker trucks to install them. But Di Suvero puts these works in a perspective worth contemplating:

“People call my sculptures “large.” But you know, they’re not large… Any of my pieces…next to a mountain is a crumb. And a mountain is nothing, if you take a whole mountain and drop it in the ocean, the ocean barely rises. And the ocean is a very small thing next to the planet. Our planet is barely a dot on the Sun, and there are billions of suns in the world. So the biggest thing we can see in the world is a star.”

I listened to an audio recording of Di Suvero saying this as I walked around Neruda’s Gate (photo below). His perspective led me to see the oblique beam of that piece as a “star pointer”—directing my gaze to some vast, distant star, or maybe an entire galaxy or nebula.