On a clear day at Storm King Art Center, the first thing you notice is not the art but the space around it—the long, rolling meadows, the slow rise of Schunnemunk Mountain, the sense that whatever you’ve brought with you will be absorbed, or at least softened, by the scale of the place. Then, gradually, the sculptures assert themselves: a steel arc cresting a hill, a cluster of forms resolving out of the grass, a structure that reveals itself only after you’ve walked halfway past it, a di Suvero beam cutting across the sky or a Calder stabile holding its balance against the wind.
Storm King has always worked this way. Since its founding in 1960, the 500-acre institution has offered a particular proposition: that sculpture is best encountered not in the white cube but in the open air, in conversation with weather, light, and time. The early canon—artists like Alexander Liberman, David Smith, and Isamu Noguchi—helped define what that could look like: large-scale, materially assertive works that meet the landscape on equal terms, joined over time by figures like Ursula von Rydingsvard and Louise Nevelson, whose works broadened the dialogue between object and environment.
But if Storm King once seemed to offer a stable definition of sculpture—monumental, abstract, industrial—that definition has been loosening for some time. The 2026 season, which opens May 17, makes that shift explicit. Three major commissions anchor the season: Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud, Saif Azzuz’s weych-pues / tàkhòne (where the rivers meet), and Liz Glynn’s Open House. Taken together, they suggest an expansion of sculpture’s terms at the art center.
“The DNA, the interest, the outlook—the desire to engage people in an embodied way with sculpture and nature together—is similar to what it’s been,” says Nora Lawrence, executive director, who has been at Storm King for 15 years and stepped into the top role in 2025. “But I do think that we have been moving forward the narrative of what incredible sculpture in the 21st century is and can be.”
A Shift in Scale
Yi’s project may be the most radical expression of that idea. Installed like an archaeological dig, “Message from the Mud” centers on a series of transparent columns filled with soil, water, and organic matter drawn from Storm King’s own landscape. Over time, exposed to sunlight, these Winogradsky columns—an ecological technique developed in the 19th century—generate visible layers of microbial life: algae, cyanobacteria, shifting bands of color that resemble abstract painting.
From a distance, the work reads as minimal, even serene. Up close, it becomes something else entirely: a living system, active and changing, indifferent to the viewer.
“What I love about both Saif’s work and Anicka’s work,” Lawrence says, “is they’re really bringing to light the things in our natural world that are always around us, but we really aren’t looking at. They’re asking visitors to start thinking about the natural world not from our own subjective place, but from its own point of departure.”
That shift—from human-centered viewing to something more decentered, more ecological—runs through the season.
Azzuz’s contribution takes the form of a 25-foot sturgeon constructed from steel, aluminum, and salvaged car parts sourced in the Hudson Valley. The fish, an ancient species now threatened globally, connects the Hudson River to the Klamath River in Northern California, where Azzuz is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. The work braids together Indigenous knowledge, environmental precarity, and industrial material, insisting on the continuity between them.
Glynn’s “Open House,” by contrast, turns to history—not deep time, but the Gilded Age. Recreated from archival images of a Fifth Avenue mansion, her installation consists of concrete casts of ballroom furniture—chairs, settees, architectural fragments—now dispersed across the landscape. Originally staged in Central Park in 2017, the work arrives at Storm King as something like a ruin, a displaced interior made public, weathering into the field.
If Yi’s work asks you to look down, into the soil, and Azzuz’s asks you to look across, toward the river, Glynn’s asks you to look backward—and to consider who has historically been invited into certain spaces, and who has not.
“They’re really different works,” Lawrence says. “Three different ways of approaching content with sculpture.” And yet, she notes, they coexist easily within Storm King’s landscape, just as a visitor might encounter di Suvero’s mammoth Pyramidian rising on one side of a path and Yi’s microcosmic columns on the other, or pass from the carved restraint of a Martin Puryear form into the tactile play of an Arlene Shechet installation nearby. “Things can coexist,” she says. “I love that.”
An Expanding Field
The sense of coexistence—of multiple histories, materials, and modes of attention occupying the same terrain—has become central to Storm King’s identity.
It’s also part of what has driven its growth. When Lawrence arrived in 2011, annual attendance hovered around 71,000. By 2025, it had reached 125,000, a 76 percent increase. The pandemic years, when outdoor spaces took on new urgency, accelerated that trajectory, but the institution had already been expanding its ambitions: more exhibitions, more public programming, more ways of activating the site.
That expansion recently took physical form in a $54 million capital project completed in 2025, which rethought the visitor experience while attempting to minimize the footprint of new construction. A former parking lot was transformed into Tippet’s Field, a landscaped expanse now used for installations and programming; a buried stream was daylighted; circulation across the site was subtly reoriented to encourage exploration.
The goal, Lawrence says, is not to direct visitors but to give them the conditions for discovery. “People are invited to take whatever path that they choose when they arrive,” she says. Even on the busiest days, she notes, the scale of the site—roughly two-thirds the size of Central Park—allows for solitude.
That balance—between being a destination and preserving a sense of openness—is one of the central tensions of Storm King’s current moment. It’s also one Lawrence seems acutely aware of. “The emphasis on the visitor at Storm King has always been something that has really been in the minds of all staff,” she says. “What will the experience of coming be like?”
Increasingly, that experience extends beyond looking. The 2026 season includes a robust slate of programming: concerts, moonlit walks, artist talks, and, in conjunction with Yi’s installation, a culinary event titled “Before Skeletons, Before Teeth” on June 27 imagines prehistoric food systems through taste and smell.
The effect blurs the boundary between artwork and program, object and experience. Sculpture, in this context, becomes less a fixed form than a set of relations—between materials, bodies, and the land itself. That shift is not without its risks. As artists move further into biology, performance, and research-based practices, the question arises: At what point does a sculpture park become something else?
Lawrence doesn’t seem particularly troubled by that prospect. “What I want Storm King to be doing is showing the public a variety of different ways that incredible sculptors and artists of our time are approaching nature,” she says. “These are sculptures, but they’re certainly far from traditional sculptures.”
Art Without Instructions
If anything, Lawrence sees this expansion as a return to first principles. Storm King has always been a place where artists can work at a scale—and with a degree of freedom—that few institutions can offer. That remains the core. “I want us to continue to be nimble,” she says. “I want us to be considered a very free and encouraging space for artists to work and find support.”
That freedom extends to visitors as well. One of the institution’s founding ideas, she notes, is a “trust in the visitor”—an interest in providing a setting for people to have their own experience, rather than prescribing one.
It’s a subtle but consequential stance. In an era when museums increasingly mediate interpretation—through wall text, audio guides, immersive technologies—Storm King continues to rely, to a surprising degree, on the simple act of walking. You move through the landscape—or think you do, until the landscape starts moving you. A path might lead from a grove of trees into a clearing where Louise Nevelson’s dark, assembled forms rise like architecture, or toward a Maya Lin earthwork that seems less built than shaped by the land itself. You encounter things. You make connections.
Sometimes those connections are aesthetic: the way a steel beam cuts against the sky, the way a form echoes the curve of a hill. Sometimes they are historical or conceptual. And sometimes they are harder to name.
The same recalibration might begin beneath a di Suvero span of steel or in the shadow of a David Smith form—works that once defined the site and now share it with more elusive presences. Standing before Yi’s columns, watching color bloom and shift in slow time, it’s difficult not to feel that you are looking at something that is not for you—not made to be consumed or even fully understood. The same might be said of the sturgeon, its body assembled from the detritus of industry, or of Glynn’s furniture, its elegance rendered strange by its exposure to the elements.
Storm King, at its best, creates the conditions for that kind of encounter: one in which the viewer is not centered but displaced, asked to recalibrate their sense of scale, time, and attention. In that sense, the institution’s evolution feels like a deepening more than a departure. The sculptures may be changing—becoming more porous, more temporal, more entangled with the systems they inhabit—but the underlying question remains the same: What does it mean to place art in a landscape, and to let the landscape answer back?
This article appears in May 2026.
