Your first Skyspace experience tends to leave a mark. Mine was at MoMA PS1, a public schoolhouse turned avant-garde art museum in Long Island City, Queens. On the third floor is Meeting, an artwork completed in 1986 by James Turrell. This was Turrell’s first Skyspace—a term the Arizona-based artist coined to describe his immersive art installations that have a chamber with an aperture in the ceiling so it’s open to the sky—in North America. To create the hole, he jackhammered through four and a half feet of concrete.
Upon entering, the room doesn’t seem like much. The communal space is spare (both the name and the design of Meeting draw from Turrell’s Quaker upbringing), and the perimeter is ringed with wooden benches inclined to allow leaning back. But then you sit and focus on the rectangle carved out of the ceiling. Passing clouds appear surreally close and intimately framed, cinéma vérité style. Eventually, the hum of the outside world recedes, and all that’s left is your perception of the synchronized LED lights that deepen against the setting sun. Turns out, if you want to turn nature into an experience, put a frame around it.
These Skyspaces have taken over all around the world, becoming travel pilgrimage destinations—and a new one is opening in Denmark this summer. It’s Turrell’s most ambitious piece yet: On June 19, As Seen Below – The Dome opens at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, 10 years after it was first announced. It’s the largest Skyspace ever built in a museum context.
The underground chamber measures 52 feet high and 130 feet across and is housed in a grassy mound. From the outside, the work is reminiscent of Ireland’s Stone Age monument Newgrange, famous for its alignment with the winter solstice sun. Part of the museum’s expansion called The Next Level, visitors will travel through an illuminated corridor into the dome, where a circular oculus opens to the world above. Color-shifting lights alter your awareness of the sky; the space can be experienced with the aperture open or closed.
Like all of Turrell’s works, the new As Seen Below – The Dome in Denmark uses light as the medium.
Photo by Lasse Jensen/Unsplash (L); photo by Mads Smidstrup/ARoS (R)
“Turrell’s Skyspaces have an uncanny ability to take the ordinary and help us realize that it truly is extraordinary,” says Alejo Benedetti, curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Turrell installed The Way of Color in 2009. Smaller in scale than As Seen Below but similar in spirit—circular, lit with LEDs, and conducive to communal awe—it offers a preview of what the Denmark piece promises to deliver. “We all sit with eyes cast upward, watching this void overhead as an array of colors illuminates the ceiling,” says Benedetti. “And then, unexpectedly, a bird flits past or a cloud enters the frame, and suddenly there’s a collective gasp.”
Skyspaces have turned that wonder into a global phenomenon—destinations in their own right. Though Turrell is perhaps best known for Roden Crater (an unfinished naked-eye observatory carved into an extinct volcano in Arizona’s Painted Desert), his first Skyspace was a private installation in 1974 at the Villa Panza in Varese, Italy. There are now more than 90 similar artworks across 26 countries.
They appear not only in museums, such as South Korea’s Museum SAN and the National Gallery of Australia, but also in unexpected places: posh hotels like Uruguay’s Posada Ayana and Patina Maldives in the Fari Islands; higher-ed institutions like Rice University in Texas and Pomona College (Turrell’s alma mater) in California; or built on a butte in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. In Houston, New York, and Philadelphia, they inhabit Quaker meeting houses—though Turrell is careful to point out that his work belongs to the art world rather than to any religious tradition.
“Each Skyspace is an embodied, unique experience,” says Benedetti. “The more of them I’ve been fortunate to see, the more I appreciate the individual nuances of each.”
Fittingly, As Seen Below opens just in time for the summer solstice. Go early, to catch as much light as possible.
