CLAREMONT, CALIF.
James Turrell
Pomona College Museum of Art
Through May 17, 2008
For much of his 30-year career, James Turrell has straddled the boundary between art and architecture. From “Skyspaces” constructed for viewing the heavens to astrological observatories in “Roden Crater,” an extinct Arizona volcano, Turrell has manipulated space or at least the perception of it.
This month, the artist will be celebrated at his alma mater, Pomona College, with the Oct. 13 opening of his latest Skyspace, as well as a symposium to explore its meaning and a companion exhibition through which to view three decades of Turrell's light-based art.
The Pomona Skyspace was commissioned to give purpose to a new campus courtyard, where students of perceptual psychology and neuro- and computer sciences will converge between classes. Turrell answered his client's call with a canopy of stainless steel resting on slim columns. A hole overhead will allow for observation of the passing sky from square stone benches at the perimeter. A square stone pool directly beneath the aperture will reflect the view.
CLAREMONT, CALIF.
James Turrell
Pomona College Museum of Art Through May 17, 2008
Credit: Griffin, Santa Monica
During the day, the Skyspace may encourage meditation or simply provide a place to check text messages in the shade. At dusk, programmed LED lighting hidden in a trough at the edges of the canopy will vary in intensity and hue, turning the underside of the eggshell-white canopy into a canvas.
“He wants his work to allow people to have a connection with the cosmos, not in a way that is overwhelming or to indicate how small you are, but to have a sense of connection,” says Kathleen Howe, director of Pomona's museum, which will display Turrell's “End Around” (shown above)—one of the artist's “Ganzfeld” works, which are named for an ESP test—along with models, drawings, and two LED “Tall Glass” works from 2006.
A native of Los Angeles, Turrell grew up with Quaker sensibilities, learned to fly, and earned degrees in perceptual psychology (from Pomona) and fine art (from Claremont Graduate School) before deciding to renegotiate the relationship between light and space through installation art.
Turrell's work has been dismissed as “just light on a wall,” and the artist actually was sued by a museum visitor who fell after trying to lean on a Turrell light “wall.” But Turrell also has been described as the last great American romantic artist, and his decades-long Roden Crater project has been likened to a Sistine Chapel in the Painted Desert.
The Pomona installation, symposium, and exhibition offer an opportunity for consensus. www.pomona.edu
NEW HAVEN, CONN.
A Field Guide to Sprawl Yale University
Through Oct. 19
Proponents use a neutral term—exurban development—to explain the phenomenon of suburb creep. But Dolores Hayden, Yale professor and architect, describes the outer ring as a disastrous combo of “privatopias” on “pork chop lots” in “zoomburbs.” Hayden imparted this new, acid-tinged vocabulary in her 2004 book, A Field Guide to Sprawl, which was accompanied by dozens of aerial photographs by Jim Wark.
An exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture takes its name from the book and its spirit from Hayden. But it began with a gentler exploration by the Hudson River Museum of Westchester County, N.Y., as the quintessential American dream burb. The Westchester show was redesigned and installed by Dean Sakamoto in the future home of the Yale sculpture department, which the architecture school will inhabit for the next year.
Credit: Jim Wark, Yale University
Nostalgia can make the tough lessons go down more easily, but fond memories of The Dick Van Dyke Show, featured in the Hudson River Museum project, won't take the sting out of unbridled growth or eliminate the need to ask what the progeny of Henry Ford and Levittown are doing with the nation's green acres.
In Hayden's lexicon, “C” is for car glut. It is a fact of life captured in a Jim Wark flyover of a Montana auto graveyard (right) that is just as big and as densely planted as the surrounding wheat fields. www.yale.edu
NEW YORK
Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York
Municipal Arts Society
Through Jan. 5, 2008
Given the current rapid pace of development in New York City, it makes sense for the Rockefeller Foundation to sponsor an exhibition devoted to the legacy of Jane Jacobs, 20th century heroine of human-scaled urban neighborhoods and walkable streets. Few gargantuan planned mini-cities have scored high for long-term desirability. But developers and their architects keep trying to improve on that record. Whether their efforts will succeed with a new generation of urban dwellers is a question the Municipal Art Society (MAS) now asks.
Through January, the MAS is staging an exhibition aimed at reintroducing Jacobs and her values to New Yorkers too young to have lived through the 1960s battles for the Village (shown at right) and SoHo and against the city's powerful planner, Robert Moses, who wanted to drive an expressway through Lower Manhattan.
It is often said that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. The MAS found in a recent poll that 58 percent of respondents worried that their neighborhoods would be adversely affected by projected redevelopment in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC2030. It is not known how many of the survey respondents had read Jacobs' seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or whether they would, as Jacobs did, take their angst to the streets.
The MAS seems to urge dialogue with today's power brokers, though the exhibition can help those who choose to “take immediate action” to ensure the city remains livable. A website (futureofny.org) and a book of essays (Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York) promise to raise Jacobs' voice long after the exhibition closes. www.mas.org