Ye, who has recently made anti-Semitic statements and praised Hitler, bought the 4,000-square-foot home in Malibu, one of the very few in the United States designed by Ando, for $57.3 million in an off-market deal. Considered architecturally significant, the home had previously belonged to the Wall Street financier Richard Sachs.

Within the art world, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect is specifically known for designing museums, including the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth in Texas.

Demolition work on the smooth, gray, poured concrete minimalist building was carried out by a day laborer, handyman, and contractor named Tony Saxon. 

Saxon eventually enlisted the help of a small crew when he was asked to strip the house of modern conveniences that most would consider essential: kitchens, bathrooms, and built-in storage. According to Parker, Ye even requested that the floor-to-ceiling windows be removed entirely on the side of the house that faces the Pacific Ocean, and that the house be disconnected from the grid, eliminating access to electricity. 

In the New Yorker story, Saxon described living in the house while working on the project, sleeping on a mattress in what was once the kitchen and dining space. In that same room, Sachs had reportedly once hung a painting by George Condo.

One of the recurring characters in Parker’s story is James Turrell, an artist with whom Ye has collaborated. “We all will live in Turrell spaces,” Ye once tweeted, somehow missing the point that there are only 80 or so of the artist’s “Skyspace” installations in the world. The Parker article included one previously unreported anecdote in which Ye attempted, and failed, to construct a “giant sphere” recalling another Turrell work for a concert on short notice.

Following Ye’s anti-Semitic comments in 2022, he lost his sneaker deal with Adidas, his fashion deal with the Gap, and his status as a billionaire. That year, the house, now gutted, was put back on the market. According to the story, the real estate brokerage the Oppenheim Group handled the listing, using the same images Sachs used to sell the place to Ye. The listing pegged the house’s value at $53 million, just a hair less than Ye paid for it. Earlier this year, Parker writes, the price of the house was lowered to a more realistic $39 million.

Following Ye’s search for radical minimalism, the house is now essentially a three-story concrete shell with oceanfront views. Having been exposed to the elements, the building is now scarred and pockmarked, its once smooth gray concrete “chewed up” and “pitted” by rain and salt, per Parker. The concrete floors are stained where metal railings rusted after exposure to salt air, wind, and water. The ocean-facing side of the house stands completely open after the removal of floor-to-ceiling windows and glass balustrades. 

The Headlines

ON THE MARKET. In about a month, the international art world will descend on Hong Kong for the first Art Basel without tough quarantine conditions since 2019—a key test for the city’s art market as other Asian metropolises, like Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo, vie to become major players in the region. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Asia chairman of Phillips, Jonathan Crockett, said that the auction house is going big in Hong Kong . Next month, it will move to a new 52,000-square-foot space in the city, and it plans to add at least 30 staff members by the end of the year, going from around 70 to more than 100. “I don’t believe there is another alternative to Hong Kong as far as what we do as a business,” Crockett told the outlet. Next year, Sotheby’s is opening a 60,000-square-foot space there, and Christie’s will move to a new home with 50,000 square feet.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES. Tate Britain announced that when it reveals a full rehang of its collection in May—its first in a decade—half of the contemporary artists on display will be women, the Guardian reports. Tate’s director of collection for British art, Polly Staple, said that the display “will embody our commitment to expanding the canon.” Across the pond, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., said that it will reopen following its $67.5 million renovation in October, the Art Newspaper reports. The project, by Baltimore’s Sandra Vicchio & Associates, adds 20 percent more space for exhibitions. “Our renewed and reimagined spaces will enhance our ability to share great works of art,” the NMWA’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling, said, terming the institution “both a museum and a megaphone.”

The Digest

An auction of clothes, accessories, and art from the estate of the storied fashion editor André Leon Talley made $1.4 million at Christie’s in New York on Wednesday, with an Andy Warhol portrait of the late Vogue chief Diana Vreeland going for $94,500. An online sale of more material from his collection closes today. [Bloomberg]

The final home of artist Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sol y Sombra (what a name!), is on the market for $15 million. Its seller is the estate of the art collector and Microsoft legend Paul Allen, according to property records. A bonus: It features a Bodhi Tree believed to be related to the one under which the Buddha sat. [Mansion Global]

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is pursuing a $125 million grant program called Imagining Freedom that will support “people directly affected by the carceral system” in the United States, the organization’s president, Elizabeth Alexander, said. So far, $41 million has awarded as part of the effort. [Artforum]

James Turrell has designed a structure that will open in Fort Worth, Texas, in mid-2023. Called the Keith House and Quaker meeting houses, it will be a secular space for meetings and events like weddings and memorials. It can fit 120 people, and it includes one of his trademark Skyspaces. [Fort Worth Report]

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT.George Condo is in Los Angeles Magazine, Anne Imhof is in Cultured, and Ferrari Sheppard is in the Los Angeles Times. All three are showing work in L.A. this week, respectively at Hauser & Wirth, Sprüth Magers, and Massimo De Carlo’s booth at Frieze , which opens today.

The Kicker

HIGH PRAISE. In the New York Times, Alex Hawgood profiled Paul Soileau, the Brooklyn-based performance artist and musician who does frenetic shows as his alter ego, Christeene—a “drag terrorist” in her terms. Artist Karen Finley, who is something of an expert on no-holds-barred actions, told the Times that she sees Soileau as “a fractured romantic dystopian character that lives between ‘Buffy the Vampire Killer,’ Wallis Simpson, Veronica Lake, and a fainting couch.” What more could you possibly ask for in a performer? [NYT]

The Headlines

A TEN-FIGURE SALE. Clear your schedule, ready your paddle, and line up a pile of cash (or a fulsome line of credit): The treasure-filled collection of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen is coming to Christie’s in New York in November with a valuation north of $1 billion, ARTnews reports. The proceeds will go to charity, as Allen—who died in 2018 —had planned. The lot lineup has not yet been announced, but it will include more than 150 works from artists including Botticelli and Cézanne, whose La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888–90) is arriving with an estimate above $100 million. (The exact timing of the auction has not yet been announced.) If all goes according to plan, the haul will set a new all-time record for a single-collection auction.

GOO GONE. Following cases of climate activists gluing themselves to the frames of artworks in the U.K. and Italy, the movement has now reached Germany, with actions this week at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden (a Raphael), the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt (Poussin), and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (Cranach the Elder), the Associated Press reports. An organization that advocates for cultural institutions in the country, the German Cultural Council, slammed the protests. “As much as I can understand the despair of the climate activists, I say clearly that the act of gluing themselves to the frames of famous works of art is clearly wrong,” Olaf Zimmermann, its managing director, told the AP. “The risk of damaging the artworks is very high.” 

The Digest

The International Council of Museums (or ICOM) has updated its official definition of a museum for the first time in 15 years, and it now includes words like “accessible,” “diversity,” and “sustainability.” [Artnet News]

Germany said that it has inked an agreement with Nigeria to begin the process of sending hundreds of Benin Bronzes that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin (now part of Nigeria) back home. Last year, Germany announced its intention to do so, a move that Nigeria has called on other nations to follow. [The Associated Press]

President Donald Trump downsized two national monuments in Utah that feature ancient Indigenous cliff dwellings and petroglyphs. The Biden administration restored their old boundaries, and the state is now suing in an attempt to block that. [The Associated Press]

The Quaker private school Friends Seminary near Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, has commissioned its own James Turrell Skyspace, which will be unveiled after a campus renovation next year. The general public will also be able to visit by making free reservations. [The Art Newspaper]

A show at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney looks at how American artist Sol LeWitt was inspired by the work of the Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, whose work he collected. [The Guardian]

The director of the Queens Museum, Sally Tallant, shared her schedule for one recent day with the Washington Post’s “The Work Day” column. It starts with swimming and Marmite on toast, and then art-related activities begin. [WP]

The Kicker

TAKING FLACK. The not-uncontroversial art publicist Kaitlin Phillips got the profile treatment from Amy Larocca in the New York Times in a story that features guest appearances from artist Ryan McNamara and Artforum editor David Velasco. Former Times media columnist Ben Smith also alights. “I think she’s one of those New York characters like Arianna Huffington, or Al Sharpton, or Donald Trump , who just realizes the rules that everyone else is playing by are kind of made-up,” he said. [NYT]

Turrell has been widely recognized for his grand installations that make use of elegant plays of light. In 2013, for example, he transformed the Guggenheim Museum in New York with his monumental installation Aten Reign, through which the institution’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda came to resemble a series of colorful concentric ovals via scrims and lights. Since the 1970s, Turrell has been at work on building his biggest piece to date at Roden Crater in northern Arizona, which has yet to open.

Salgado is known for his black-and-white photographs that attempt to visualize climate change, often by picturing places, species, and peoples that are being rapidly reshaped by global warming. Past series have focused on oil wells in Kuwait, coffee workers around the world, and the Amazonia region of Salgado’s home country, Brazil. In addition to his work as an artist, Salgado has undertaken various activist initiatives, some of them with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado.

Salgado received the award for painting, and Turrell received the award for sculpture. Also receiving the Praemium Imperiale this year are architect Glenn Murcutt and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who were awarded prizes for architecture and music, respectively.

A prize for theatre and film was not awarded this year. “Due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, a number of candidates were unable to meet the requirements for the award,” the Praemium Imperiale said of its choice not to name a recipient of that prize.

Light and Space artist Turrell will present Ganzfeld—its title means “complete field” in German—in which visitors are immersed in a room of monochrome lighting, altering their perception of depth. British artist and theater designer Es Devlin’s Forest of Us looks to be a mirrored, multi-sensory maze that references bronchial structures. TeamLab, the Japanese art collective known for staging popular electronic installations, has created a series of installations, including Universe of Water Particles, a work that immerses visitors in a “digital continuum of water particles” which respond to touch. The exhibition is slated to be on view until at least 2022, and timed tickets start at at $30.

“The artists inaugurating Superblue’s first experiential art center offer a glimpse into the breadth of the experiential art movement and the extraordinary possibilities for the public to engage with and activate these kinds of works,” Superblue cofounder and chief executive officer Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst said in a statement.

The Miami location occupies a 50,000-square-foot former industrial building situated opposite the Rubell Museum, one of the most preeminent private contemporary art collections in the country. The venue features over 30,000 square feet of installation space, and the remainder will be dedicated to annual programming including performances, workshops, and seminars.

Superblue started in 2019 as PaceX, an initiative to commission works at the intersection of art and technology, with funding from billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. Capitalizing on the growing demand for ticketed “experiences,” as opposed to conventional art institutions or commercial galleries, the company plans to expand to major cities worldwide.

On Thursday night, Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, both of which are showing works by Turrell at Frieze Los Angeles, cohosted a star-studded party for the artist, attended by the likes of Museum of Contemporary Art director Klaus Biesenbach, noted collector and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and pop star Grimes, who staged a surprise performance. At the event, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Pincus, the founder of the online gaming firm Zynga, announced a $3 million pledge to Turrell’s long-gestating creation in a dormant volcano.

“The project itself feels, to me, like modern-day pyramids,” Pincus told the Los Angeles Times. “The ambition and scale and scope of it is something that has the potential to be something that people, many generations from now, will be able to experience and get something amazing from—maybe something beyond what we can imagine today.”

In 2019, West donated $10 million to the project and shot his film Jesus Is King inside the site. That same year, Arizona State University entered into a partnership with Turrell and the non-profit Skystone Foundation, which oversees Roden Crater. In return, the crater has been integrated into the university’s academic activities in a multidisciplinary program drawing on different aspects of the university.

Kanye West in concert.

DAVE ALLOCCA/STARPIX/SHUTTERSTOCK

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News

A forthcoming IMAX from Kanye West was shot at James Turrell’s Roden Crater. [ARTnews]

John Gerrard is now represented by Pace. [ARTnews]

The president of the patron group Amis du Palais de Tokyo was dismissed after posting threatening comments about Greta Thunberg. [Artforum]

The activist groups No New Jails, Decolonize This Place, and Take Back the Bronx staged a protest outside the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in Manhattan. The action focused on the organization’s president, Darren Walker, who recently wrote a blog post in support of splitting up the Rikers jail complex into four smaller detention centers. [Hyperallergic]

Exhibitions

Kehinde Wiley’s large-scale sculpture Rumors of War was unveiled in New York’s Times Square on Friday. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, dealer Sean Kelly, and other art world luminaries were in attendance for the work’s debut. [ARTnews]

“L.A. Blacksmith,” a group show at the California African American Museum, “takes an expansive view of what constitutes blacksmithing…as well as its distinctive sub-Saharan traditions,” writes Christopher Knight. [Los Angeles Times]

In Margate, England, an exhibition at Carl Freedman Gallery features works incorporating stockings and pantyhose by 22 artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Lucas, and Man Ray. Zoe Bedeaux, curator of the presentation, said, “Tights are the base material, but this show is not about tights.” [The New York Times]

A new installation in the U.K.’s Thetford Forest will feature sculptures, inspired by classical mythology, by Lisa Wright. Designer Tom Piper has created structures that will display Wright’s life-size figures. [The Guardian]

Frieze London

From October 4 to 6, Himali Singh Soin will present a new film commission at Frieze London. The work, titled We Are Opposite Like That II, was informed by her 2017 trip on a sailboat in the North Pole. [T: The New York Times Style Magazine]

Film & Photography

Behold photographer Mark Mahaney’s images of Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States. “Landing, it looked like we were dropping down onto the moon,” the artist said. [The New Yorker]

“When Dalí and Buñuel made L’Âge d’Or (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but Joker yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets,” Anthony Lane writes in his review of the forthcoming film starring Joaquin Phoenix. [The New Yorker]

The Alpha (East) Tunnel of James Turrell’s Roden Crater.

KLAUS OBERMAN/COURTESY JAMES TURRELL

When James Turrell flew the skies of Arizona in 1974, not yet acquainted with the volcano that would soon become his life’s work, he piloted his tiny plane over the nearby sites of Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monument. The former is a hulking cinder cone that built up after dramatic eruptions around the turn of the first millennium, when lava spewed forth in red and yellow hues said to have inspired its name. The latter was home to settlements of ancient indigenous peoples known as the Sinagua—so described for their ability to live “without water”—whose desert descendants today include Hopi and Navajo natives.

Had he flown an hour or so south, to Tempe, Turrell would have seen an array of buildings that make up Arizona State University. That would have been before the development of the gleaming new School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Center for Science and the Imagination, institutions of a kind that has made ASU a hub for innovation and interdisciplinary thought. It would have predated the construction of Air Apparent, a sculptural observatory that Turrell designed to encourage students on campus to commune with the sky. And it would have been much longer still—some four-and-a-half decades—before Turrell and ASU would enter into a momentous partnership to aid in the completion of perhaps the grandest artwork ever conceived: Roden Crater.

The extinct volcano in an otherworldly area flanked by forestland and the Painted Desert has commanded much of the 76-year-old artist’s attention over time. When he first laid eyes on it in his early 30s, he was flying over locations now being considered for a visitor’s center and lodging for legions of art pilgrims eager to experience an artwork that few have seen. Practical necessities like roadways and rest stops require serious engineering in environs so remote, and then there is the matter of money: at least $200 million needed to ramp up construction so as to open Roden Crater to the public in a projected five years.

[See the Table of Contents for the Summer 2019 edition of ARTnews: “Reshaping the American Museum.”]

The partnership forged with the university last year makes all that more feasible, thanks to a fateful meeting at the Crater between Turrell and Michael Govan, president of the artist’s Skystone Foundation (as well as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), along with ASU president Michael Crow and Steven Tepper, dean of the university’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Assembled together in an immersive observatory still in the midst of creation, the group hatched a plan to engage Roden Crater from different perspectives. “James said, ‘What are your ideas for how the university might support and connect with this work?’ ” recalled Tepper, who at ASU leads the nation’s largest comprehensive design and arts school at a research university. “We went back and started thinking about all the powerful ways that Roden Crater could serve the university, and how the university had a unique set of assets that could benefit the Crater and help it live in the world once it is completed.”

Crow, for his part, has been celebrated in the annals of higher education for transforming ASU from a party school to a future-minded interdisciplinary institution that U.S. News & World Report has named the most innovative university in the country for the past four years. With a student body of some 110,000 in an assembly of schools strategically aligned to merge science and the humanities with other realms of study, Crow commands considerable potential to help Turrell turn Roden Crater from a nomadic private enterprise into an accessible public destination ready to greet the world. He also has access to fund-raising channels beyond those tuned most expressly to the arts.

James Turrell, Air Apparent, at Arizona State University.

ANDY DELISLE/©ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/COURTESY JAMES TURRELL

As an artwork that encompasses a sprawling landmass as well as decades’ worth of crafting to customize it as a man-made offering to the cosmos, Roden Crater may be “an order of magnitude too great” for conventional means of art-world funding, said Govan—whereas, “when a university comes in, they have particle accelerators. They see what Roden Crater is as an element of the university, and it makes sense, even by scale.”

He cited another example: “People give gifts of hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitals that are part of universities—teaching hospitals that are there as much to educate as to be part of the health system.” Roden Crater can work in a similar manner, Govan said, as evidenced by a university curriculum already underway with ASU field labs devoted to engaging Turrell’s work in classes like “Art and Sensory Acuity,” “Volcanic Arts & Sciences,” “Light and the Imagination,” and “Indigenous Stories and Sky Science.”

Students from a variety of disciplines enrolled in the first class last fall and others that followed this spring, with aspiring artists joined by peers studying architecture, engineering, environmental design, sustainability, geology, astrophysics, American Indian studies, and more. The mix of interests aligns with the practice of Turrell, who early in his career delved into perceptual psychology, optics, mathematics, and astronomy in the service of his art. The interdisciplinary approach also makes sense for a project whose scale—in terms of size as well as time, as Roden Crater has been tuned to astronomical cycles that transpire over thousands of years—raises complex questions.

“We’re in a research and development phase, prototyping a program to understand its potential: what it can be, how to scale it,” said Olga Viso, a former director for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., who was brought in as a senior adviser on the partnership between Turrell and ASU. “How do you develop a visitor experience? If we build facilities, what will they be like? It’s all in an exploratory phase to figure out what the terms are and to try to raise as much money as we can to accelerate the completion of the Crater.”

“What was clear is that there wasn’t a museum partnership that could handle this,” said Govan, whose work with Turrell began decades before he became the director of LACMA in 2006. “Roden Crater had been sponsored by art collectors and museums very focused on it, but when we build on this scale, it’s supposed to be a museum that you put art inside. The idea that the thing itself is as big as a museum in terms of expenditure is disconcerting to the normal model.”

Olga Viso at Sunset Crater.

COURTESY ASU

In the unusual arrangement, Viso sees knowledge to be gleaned by arts institutions seeking to maintain their missions while assessing means of adaptation for the future. After stepping down as director of the Walker in 2017, in the wake of controversy surrounding Sam Durant’s Scaffold—a public sculpture that was dismantled after criticism that it was insensitive in its evocation of a painful episode in Native American history—she has thought a lot about the prospects and constraints that museums face amid changing cultural roles and expectations.

“It’s a difficult moment for all institutions, not just museums,” Viso said. “Society is questioning what institutions mean and stand for. Youth culture doesn’t believe in institutions because they’re staid and part of the status quo.” Few cultural enterprises are as institutional as the university, and Viso finds inspiration in the ways that Arizona State has evolved since Michael Crow took over as president in 2002. Speaking of his transformative time at the school so far, Viso said, “I’m really drawn to what’s happening here with a visionary leader who has challenged base assumptions about an institution and how it’s structured. He’s challenged notions of tenure, put schools together into independent fields, and focused on how a university can impact society and create more intersectional thinking in the future. He had the idea to reinvent what a public university is, and museums need that same reinvention right now.”

Citing a crisis of leadership at many museums across the U.S., Viso said the university model could be instructive. Different forces have shortened the typical tenure of museum directors, moving Viso to write in a recent article in Museum magazine, “What does the face of museum leadership look like in another decade when the average tenure of an art museum director trends more toward 3–5 years rather than 10 years, and there continue to be steady rates of retirement?” She noted that ASU, by contrast, has been able to “recruit people at the forefront of their field and create a platform where they feel energized and have the ability not to fall into institutional traps. They’re given a platform to try something different and evolve. If it’s not working, they just regroup and rethink—and create. Museums sometimes suffer from the need to preserve approaches and strategies instead of thinking to reinvent, restructure, and maybe even abandon certain ways of working.”

The instinct to preserve can hinder museums in different quarters, Viso said. “The institutional structure is in this moment of crisis, toggling between the status quo and the need for change and a realignment of leadership, staff, audience, and boards. That’s what’s out of whack, which is why you’re seeing so much transition.”

One way for institutions to move into the future is by banding together. Recalling her time at the Walker, Viso spoke of acquiring choreographer Merce Cunningham’s archive in partnership with other institutions (including the New York Public Library and the Merce Cunningham Trust) collectively committed to supporting the artist’s long-term legacy plan. “When we were first approached by Merce, his hope was it would all go to one institution,” Viso said. “But one institution can’t really do it effectively.” An adaptable co-op method can make the museum model more amenable, however. “Everything is about owning and the individuality of each museum, but it really [should be] about stewardship,” Viso said. “My generation of directors is much more collaborative than prior generations. Let’s collection-share—why not? Let’s share curatorial expertise across boundaries. Let’s co-own works. Museumgoers don’t care who owns what.”

Museums of different sizes with differing needs would also be wise to consider unconventional partners. “Museums shouldn’t be in the restaurant business or taking on enterprises that are not in their wheelhouse,” Viso said. Mutually beneficial arrangements, however, warrant “exploring partnerships with organizations that aren’t necessarily arts organizations but serve a community in a way that a museum might not have the capacity to but cares about.

“It’s happening more and more—some of it out of necessity, some out of generational shift, some out of opportunity,” Viso said. “Artists like Merce and James are pushing this—artists whose practices are so expansive that they can’t live within one institution. It takes a different approach to legacy and stewardship to think about how to support that. I hope the audacity of ASU taking this on in such a significant institutional way could be inspiring to other organizations and institutions to think of different kinds of partners to advance their support of art and artists and be impactful in their communities. This is one way to ensure relevance.”

Students overlooking the Northern Arizona landscape from the rim of Roden Crater.

JORDAN NEEL

As Viso spoke during the three-hour drive from Tempe to the area around Roden Crater, views of saguaro cacti—some of them more than 100 years old and weighing several tons—yielded to verdant forest and then to parched desert vistas. The trip has become routine for Viso, who, during the partnership’s enterprise-planning phase, has worked closely with Turrell and the many professors and students who now stake a collective claim on his time.

The same roads past Flagstaff—the closest sizable town, though still an hour away—have recently been traveled by groups of students who have visited not just Roden Crater but significant sights around it in an attempt to understand Turrell’s undertaking as a holistic work of art engaged with its environment and the cultures that have long called it home. For her class “Art and Sensory Acuity,” professor Christine Lee took a caravan of students for a tour of the Crater accompanied by a specialist studying taste and smell in ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, as well as E. C. Krupp, an astronomer and director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who has worked with Turrell since the 1960s. “The Crater is an instrument,” Lee said, “and I wanted the students to feel like they are instruments themselves, with senses they can dial like a microscope that can zoom in and out.” The students’ experience of Turrell and his vision was profound—and potentially influential. “Even though it seems like an unattainable type of piece to make, I keep reminding them that he started out as an art student.”

Wanda Dalla Costa, an architect and professor in ASU’s Design School and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, took her students on a four-day field trip for “Indigenous Stories and Sky Science.” The tour started with a lecture on ages-old communion with the heavens at Navajo Technical University and included stops at significant astronomical sites like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, where ancient Pueblo peoples thrived in the centuries between 850 and 1250. “It’s been one of the most profound classes I’ve ever taught,” Dalla Costa said. “It’s a journey the kids went through, not in the classroom but with people in the community, getting out onto the land and hearing stories about sky science, rituals, and everyday life.”

“The experience has been really transformative for me,” said Rhonda Harvey, a Navajo student enrolled in the course while working on her master’s degree in architecture. “I’ve always been interested but have never been able to fully study sky science from an indigenous perspective, and it’s definitely influenced me as a designer to be more holistic in relating to the context of not just the natural landscape of a site but also the sky.”

For his collaborative class with a multimedia artist and professor, Ed Garnero, a seismologist who has not one but two lava lamps in his office in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, engaged a question that had been on his mind: “What would it be like if you took the pithy narrative of a TED talk and the light, motion, and sound from Cirque du Soleil and mashed it up to make fabulous documentaries where people aren’t sure if they just saw a play or were taught something?” Experiencing Roden Crater together with students offered an unusual opportunity to “teach science through emotion,” Garnero said. “The way that artists respond to scientific information is so unbounded by these barriers that we, as scientists, impose on ourselves because we supposedly know what can and can’t be.”

Sherri Wasserman, a Ph.D. student in the class titled “Light and the Imagination,” said she enrolled with excitement when she learned a trip to Roden Crater was part of the syllabus. “I was like, ‘I get to do what?’ ” she said. But the subject took her and her fellow classmates into unexpected territory. “We’re really interested in the political geographies of how it was built, who goes and who can or can’t, why it’s there. What are the things you can’t see even if you could go there?”

The range of classes and the kinds of questions they can consider are vast. “This is ASU, and we dream big,” said Jason Schupbach, who left his job as director of Design and Creative Placemaking programs for the National Endowment for the Arts to head Arizona State’s Design School. “We aren’t interested in studying Roden Crater or creating research around it as just an art piece. We’re interested in the full picture, and so is James. He is a true savant who combines so many intelligences to create his art, and we want to build more James Turrells.”

While such building is underway, details beyond the partnership’s enterprise-planning stage—to be evaluated later this year, to suss out a fuller arrangement in the future—remain to be established. But already the project has made for change, directly and indirectly. Last summer, the principal players established the LACMA-ASU Master’s Fellowship in Art History, after Govan and Crow got to talking about possible collaborations beyond Roden Crater and wound up with an innovative work-study program to engage students from different backgrounds in order to diversify the curatorial workforce for the future.

And then, of course, there is Roden Crater itself, which after long-sustained work on an enormous scale, may finally be nearing completion. “In cosmic time, this happened a second ago,” Govan said of the partnership. “But there’s a big difference in having the intelligence and resources of a university to study and map out the future. There are a lot more human and financial resources to analyze, study, and develop a practical long-term plan for something that doesn’t have any precedent.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 68 under the title “Higher
Education.”

James Meyer speaks about Virginia Dwan.

GEORGE KOELLE

The next time vandals shoot bullets into Sun Tunnels or Burning Man fans dig a tribute to Nine Nevada Depressions, they might like to do so while sipping a Spiral Jetty IPA. They should beware the kind of bats that haunt the boxy concrete sculptures spanning a half-mile of desert grasslands in Marfa, Texas, but they could find peace in a Los Angeles Skyspace installation that doubles as a movie theater with seats modeled after those in an old propeller plane.

Such were some of the thoughts that rose to mind in the midst of “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture,” a symposium last week at the Frick Collection in New York. Organized by the institution’s Center for the History of Collecting, the heady five-hour affair surveyed the legacy of Land art and the present-day status of earthworks whose place in art history is still being negotiated.

Epic Brewing’s art-inspired beer.

The program drew heavily on the Dia Art Foundation, which oversees Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, both constructed in Utah in the 1970s. Dia also connects historically to Michael Heizer (the creator of Nine Nevada Depressions), Donald Judd (the Minimalist maven of Marfa), and James Turrell (who built a special Skyspace cinema for the L.A.-based collector Jarl Mohn, himself a participant in a panel at the symposium).

The event kicked off with a keynote speech by Suzaan Boettger, author of the 2003 book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, who contrasted the ever-prolific Smithson with T. S. Eliot’s comparatively lazy “patient etherized upon a table” before projecting some funny found wedding pictures from Spiral Jetty and showing a hoppy tribute to the work by the craft-beer enterprise Epic Brewing. Setting art of the kind in the context of political upheaval in the ’60s and ’70s, Boettger flashed a poster supporting draft-dissenting refuseniks with the slogan “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” And she held out for special attention a message on a bright yellow painting by Walter De Maria streaked with the words “The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth.” Thought to allude to the hue of Caterpillar-brand tractors, the painting was the only work to sell from gallerist Virginia Dwan’s first “Earthworks” show in 1968—to the storied taxi tycoon and art collector Robert Scull.

Boettger made a site-specific connection of her own when she showed the Frick Collection’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1476–78) by painter Giovanni Bellini, whose ascetic subject, set against a dramatic backdrop of rocks, echoed Heizer’s early declarations about Land art’s anti-commercial aspects. (Bellini’s Francis and Heizer share something in the way of rugged good looks and chiseled features, too.) In more contemporary terms, Boettger called Kanye West “the latest patron of the ‘uncollectible’”—for his recent donation of $10 million to James Turrell’s Roden Crater—and showed a picture of the hip-hop star and “his new chum” taking in the sights at the artist’s long-term show currently at MASS MoCA.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1476–78.

MICHAEL BODYCOMB/THE FRICK COLLECTION

Dia curator Alexis Lowry followed with a talk on Heizer’s Nine Nevada Depressions, supported financially by Scull after the artist sent the collector an introductory letter in 1968. That was shortly after a lesser-known earthwork the year before by Claes Oldenburg, who for a piece titled Placid Civic Monument dug a grave-size hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, that same afternoon, filled it back up again, with nary a trace of monumentality to be found.

Lowry focused mainly on Heizer’s connection with Scull—shown in pictures wearing dapper white shoes on visits to the desert by helicopter and plane—and a disagreement over a photo album documenting sculptural cuts the artist made in the hard, dry ground. Heizer had a complicated relationship to photography of work meant to be experienced in the elements—such that for Dwan’s “Earthworks” exhibition, Lowry noted, he showcased his work in the form of backlit transparencies rather than photo prints, to highlight the transitory aspects of pictures in comparison to the concreteness of the work itself.

Though Scull cherished the leather-bound album that Heizer made for him, the artist grew increasingly uneasy with its existence and ultimately took it back to destroy it, against his patron’s wishes. But all was OK in the end, Lowry noted, as the two entangled characters remained friends.

James Meyer, a curator at the National Gallery of Art (and for two years at Dia), followed with a talk on the significance of Dwan, who had been scheduled to participate in a panel but did not appear. Meyer passed on well wishes from the legendary dealer, who he noted recently moved to 5th Avenue from her decades-long home in the Dakota building across Central Park.

Contemplating “uncollectibility” in the context of the symposium’s theme, Meyer said, to a round of laughs in the room, “Perhaps what is uncollectible now is art that is just so expensive that nobody can afford it.” He noted that Dwan—whose recent survey show, “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971,” he curated—could not sell work in her early years by such significant figures as Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Rauschenberg, and certainly not by artists digging holes and marking lines in the middle of nowhere.

Meyer told a story of Smithson and Holt ditching Dwan on a boat trip through the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, leaving her alone for a spell by the side of the Usumacinta River in the midst of quicksand. And he noted, with assistance from fellow experts in the audience, that the cost for the land and creation of Double Negative—Michael Heizer’s famous mesa-cut in Nevada, arguably the most important work of Land art of the era—amounted to the modest sum (considering its scale and significance) of $27,000.

Michelle Stuart, Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, 1975.

©STUART STUDIO ARCHIVE

Following Meyer was a one-on-one talk between Dia curator Kelly Kivland and artist Michelle Stuart, who—after a stint as a mural assistant with Diego Rivera in Mexico in the ’50s—has worked with and on the earth in different ways. Her Sayreville Strata Quartet from 1976 is on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, in the form of four large paper scrolls rubbed with dirt from a town in New Jersey whose reddish firmament has made it a haven for brick-making. Stuart talked a lot about a momentous work created for Artpark in Lewiston, New York, in 1975: Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, a 460-foot-long roll of paper descended down a gorge that had been “the original location of Niagara Falls at the time of the last glacier approximately 12,000 years ago,” according to a description in Stuart’s book Sculptural Objects: Journeys In & Out of the Studio.

Speaking of the formative cast of collectors and supporters of work of the kind, Stuart made a pointed distinction between Americans whose concerns included longevity and conditioning and Germans—like Alfred Schmela and Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich—who were more open to entropy and degradation. “For some reason,” Stuart said, “the Germans didn’t worry about anything.”

Conservation work on Sun Tunnels, with spiraling bullet lines inside.

ROSA LOWINGER/©RLA CONSERVATION OF ART & ARCHITECTURE, INC.

Rosa Lowinger, a conservator whose firm RLA Conservation of Art & Architecture is based in L.A. and Miami, followed with a talk about her activities, including working on Judd’s concrete boxes in Marfa and treating them for stains from droppings left by bats who sometimes dwell inside. Another big project involved the recent refurbishment of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah, where visitors have taken to occasionally shooting bullets inside to watch them spin their way out in loop-the-loop patterns. Molten metal from bullets grinding against concrete at high speeds leaves lines—a fate that Holt, during her lifetime, reconciled and said was fine to accept without a fight.

The symposium’s final segment, moderated by Dia director Jessica Morgan, featured two collectors who know their way around art invested in outsize senses of time and scale: Leonard Riggio and Jarl Mohn. Riggio, the retired founder of Barnes & Noble booksellers, spoke of giving a gift long ago for the prospective completion of Michael Heizer’s massive work City, promised then by Michael Govan—a longtime Heizer collaborator and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—to be completed within 18 months. When Heizer heard of the timeframe stated, he offered a corrective calling for a slightly longer span—of nine years. “Now it’s 12 years later,” Riggio said, with a laugh.

On the subject of buying artworks as promised gifts to institutions, as is his habit, Riggio said of himself and his wife Louise, “Our citizenship is as important as anything we do.” A collection of works by Isamu Noguchi in an outdoor pavilion at their house in Bridgehampton, New York, he said, will go to the Noguchi Museum at some point. “We get to live with them,” he said—but the works’ ultimate fate will be in the hands of others.

Jessica Morgan with Jarl Mohn and Leonard Riggio.

GEORGE KOELLE

Mohn, the outgoing CEO of NPR, spoke of being convinced to turn over the design for a movie theater he’d been wanting for his home to James Turrell—“the world’s most expensive impulse buy,” he said. Asked how a visit to The Lightning Field—Walter De Maria’s expansive installation in New Mexico—affected his thoughts on collecting, Mohn laughed, “It makes me realize how futile it is.” Better instead is supporting work that can be experienced by others, in different contexts. “We shouldn’t own these things as individuals,” Mohn said. “We need to be helpful.”

Riggio agreed, saying of artworks that stand to be around for a long while to come, “They tell the story of our civilization.”