Maps & Tours
Storm King Art Center’s Entangled Art Historical Ecologies (2024)
Project Description: Nestled in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, Storm King Art Center has served as a model for outdoor sculpture parks across the world, attracting visitors to its 500 acres of expansive fields and rugged, forested topography. This thesis analyzes Storm King’s past, present, and future land relations through a hybrid art historical and ecocritical interrogation of its sculpture collections, its landscaping practices, and how these curatorial and conservation strategies have shaped the park’s biodiversity. As outdoor museums confront ongoing threats of ecological crisis, this art historical biogeography of Storm King Art Center engages in transhistorical debates of institutional stewardship by entangling enduring divisions between the manmade and natural, growth and decay. This project proposes an alternative sustainable land-based ethic of interspecies site-specific collaborative care amidst shifting ecocultural terrain.
Research for this project was gathered through site visits, ecological data collection, species observation and identification, interviews with staff, studies of current infrastructural construction plans, and explorations of Storm King’s expansive administrative and oral history archives. Case studies include artworks by sculptors David Smith, Kenneth Snelson, Mark di Suevro, Maya Lin, Peter Coffin, Chakaia Booker, Sarah Sze, Richard Serra, and David Brooks. The design of these maps take inspiration from Storm King’s visitor’s guide.
The full text of “Out of the White Cube and Into The Open Green: Storm King Art Center's Entangled Art Historical Ecologies” is available to read here.
Additional Field Research Images