MUSEUMS: James Turrell on Light and Space at Roden Crater
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space. […] I do like a place that has a powerful quality. What is that quality? I’m not sure, but Roden Crater has that.” — James Turrell
James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles) knows a thing or two about social distancing. His magnum opus masterwork in process, Roden Crater, is a site-specific intervention into the desert landscape just outside Flagstaff, Arizona. With recent high-profile, multi-million dollar donations from the likes of musician Kanye West and entrepreneur Mark Pincus, plus a partnership with the University of Arizona, Turrell is in the midst of a $200 million campaign to complete the work and open it to the public in the next five years. In 2013, Los Angeles County Museum of Art produced this video interview with Turrell about Roden Crater as part of the traveling retrospective of his work.
From LACMA:
James Turrell: A Retrospective explores nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell, a key artist in the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and 70s. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional work with holograms. One section is devoted to the Turrell masterwork in process, Roden Crater, a site-specific intervention into the landscape just outside Flagstaff, Arizona, presented through models, plans, photographs, and films.