The Storm King Arts Center in upstate New York commissed a massive land art sculpture by Maya Lin. ‘Storm King Wavefield’ covers 11 acres out of the Storm King center’s 500-acre sculpture park, and is set in a shallow, amphitheater-like depression, once a gravel pit supplying material for highways. According to the New York Times, the wavefield’s ”seven parallel rows of rolling, swelling peaks were inspired by the forms of midocean waves but echo the mountains and hills around them.” This wavefield is part of a larger series: the first was installed at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1995, and the second, completed in 2005, covers 30,000 square feet near the Federal courthouse in Miami.
Holland Cotter, art critic for the New York Times says this third, larger piece at 240,000 square feet is “already a classic. It has the gravity of Ms. Lin’s commemorative sculptures and the sociability of the earlier “wave” pieces, which lent themselves to picnics, play and privacy.” Cotter also calls the piece “bracingly environmental” and sees “something a little freakish about these slinky, reptilian swellings in the ground,” but, finally, thinks it’s a “a soul-soothing place of retreat.”
Read the article and see images of the first wave field at the University of Michigan.
“Storm King Wavefield” is on permanent view at Storm King Art Center, Old Pleasant Hill Road, Mountainville, N.Y. Also, check out “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” which is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, through July 12.
Image credit: The New York Times
