James Turrell

In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel, at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence.[9] By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to come through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections.[10] In Shallow Space Constructions (1968) he used screened partitions, allowing a radiant effusion of concealed light to create an artificially flattened effect within the given space.[11] That same year, he participated in the Los Angeles County Museum's Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz.[12]

In 1969, he made sky drawings with Sam Francis, using colored skywriting smoke and cloud-seeding materials.[13] A pivotal environment Turrell developed from 1969 to 1974, The Mendota Stoppages, used several rooms in the former Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica which were sealed off, with the window apertures controlled by the artist to allow natural and artificial light to enter the darkened spaces in specific ways.[14]

Satellite view of Roden Crater, the site of an epic artwork in progress by James Turrell outside Flagstaff, Arizona

Rendering of the interior of the Guggenheim installation Aten Reign

Turrell is perhaps best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater. He acquired an extinct cinder cone volcano located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1979. Since then he has spent decades moving tons of dirt and building tunnels and apertures to turn this crater into a massive naked-eye observatory for experiencing celestial phenomena.[5]

Although he works in the American desert, Turrell does not consider himself an earthworks artist like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer: "You could say I'm a mound builder: I make things that take you up into the sky. But it's not about the landforms. I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit." He added: "I apprehend light — I make events that shape or contain light."[5]

The completion date for the Crater has been pushed back several times for funding and construction reasons, with the artist missing early targets in the 1990s. The last time Turrell or his team went on record talking about a completion date, the goal was 2011; but according to a 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times, "nobody volunteers a date any more."[15]

Access to Roden Crater is limited to friends, though devoted fans can gain access by completing the "Turrell Tour", which involves seeing a Turrell in 23 countries worldwide. During May 2015, Roden Crater was open to a select group of 80 people, as part of a fund raiser, by allowing visits of 20 people per day during the course of four days, at a cost of $6,500 per person.[16]

As Roden Crater has been long shrouded in secrecy, fans have attempted to sneak in without the artist's permission. Some have succeeded.[17]

In the 1970s, Turrell began his series of "skyspaces" enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof. A Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof.[18] As a lifelong Quaker, Turrell designed the Live Oak Meeting House for the Society of Friends, with an opening or skyhole in the roof, wherein the notion of light takes on a decidedly religious connotation. (See PBS documentary). His work Meeting (1986) at P.S. 1, which consists of a square room with a rectangular opening cut directly into the ceiling, is a recreation of such a meeting house.[19] In 2013, Turrell created another Quaker skyspace, Greet the Light, at the newly rebuilt Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia.[20]

Space That Sees, at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

In a New York Times article on L.A. collectors building skyspaces in their backyards, Jori Finkel describes a skyspace as a " celestial viewing room designed to create the rather magical illusion that the sky is within reach -- stretched like a canvas across an opening in the ceiling."[21]

In 1992, James Turrell's Irish Sky Garden opened at the Liss Ard Estate,[22] Skibbereen, Co Cork, Ireland. The giant earth and stoneworks has a crater at its center. A visitor enters through a doorway in the perimeter of the rim, walks through a passage and climbs stairs to enter,[23] then lies on the central plinth and looks upwards to experience the sky framed by the rim of the crater. "The most important thing is that inside turns into outside and the other way around, in the sense that relationships between the Irish landscape and sky changes" (James Turrell).[24]

Since 2009, Turrell's Third Breath, 2005 is part of the permanent exhibition of the Centre for International Light Art (CILA) in Unna, Germany. It is a Camera obscura, consisting of two rooms: In the lower, cubic room (Camera Obscura Space), the visitor sees an image of the sky which is being reflected through a lens on the ground. In the upper, cylindrical room (Sky Space), the sky can be seen directly through a hole in the ceiling.

Other Skyspaces include the Kielder Skyspace (2000) on Cat Cairn in Kielder, Northumberland, England; Knight Rise (2001) at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Second Wind (2005) in Vejer de la Frontera, Spain; the Sky-Space (2006) in Salzburg, Austria; and The other Horizon (2004) in Vienna, Austria (MAK-Branch Geymüllerschlössel).[25] Three Gems (2005) at the de Young Museum is Turrell's first Skyspace to adopt the stupa form.[26] At Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Marquess of Cholmondeley commissioned a folly to the east of the great house. Turrell's Skyspace presents itself from the exterior as an oak-clad building raised on stilts. From the inside of the structure, the viewer's point of view is focused upwards and inevitably lured into contemplating the sky as framed by the open roof.[27]

Skyspace: Dividing the Light (2007), Draper Courtyard, Pomona College, Claremont

In 2007, Turrell's Skyspace: Dividing the Light, is notable for incorporating water and landscaping. This Skyspace is an open-air pavilion, with a canopy structure and aperture, lighting program, pool, and landscaping, situated in the Draper Courtyard at Pomona College. The 16-foot square canopy aperture mirrors the continuous pool below, which is surrounded by granite seating and landscaping.[28] At its opening, David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times called it "one of the best works of public art in recent memory."[29]

His 2007 Deer Shelter Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, commissioned by The Art Fund, was awarded that year's 2007 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.[30][31]

In 2013, Turrell completed The Color Inside, a Skyspace on top of the William C. Powers, Jr. Student Activity Center on campus at The University of Texas at Austin. [32]The Color Inside was commissioned by Landmarks, the public art collection of The University of Texas at Austin.[33]

In September 2018, the Skyspace Lech was opened to public. It is located in Oberlech in Vorarlberg (Austria).[34]

In 2009 the first museum worldwide dedicated to Turrell’s work was opened in the province of Salta, Argentina. It is part of the Hess Collection at Colome. The light art pieces represent five decades of the artist’s career, like a time tunnel, and are exhibited in a progression of nine rooms within a 1,700-square-metre (18,000 sq ft) space. The experience concludes with a remarkable example of Turrell’s exhibited sky spaces, created within the inner courtyard of the museum, which reaches maximum intensity in the views of the Andean sky at dawn and sunset.

Turrell is also known for his light tunnels and light projections that create shapes that seem to have mass and weight, though they are created with only light. Turrell's 1968 projection of a suspended luminous pink pyramid, Raethro Pink, was acquired by the Welsh National Museum of Art.[35] His work Acton is a very popular exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It consists of a room that appears to have a blank canvas on display, but the "canvas" is actually a rectangular hole in the wall, lit to look otherwise. Security guards are known to come up to unsuspecting visitors and say "Touch it! Touch it!"

Turrell's works defy the accelerated habits of people, especially when looking at art. He feels that viewers spend so little time with the art that it makes it hard to appreciate.

I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer. Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on. But, you know, there's this slow-food movement right now. Maybe we could also have a slow-art movement, and take an hour.[36]

Art critic John McDonald writes that Turrell's works are "dull to describe but magical to experience."[37]