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410-822-ARTS (2787)

www.academyartmuseum.org

The Academy Art Museum is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts.

James Turrell PerspectivesApril 20 - July 7, 2013

Academy Art Museum

19Aerial Photo Mosaic, 1982Photograph (carbon print), Photographed with Fairchild TI cameraimage 24 ¾ x 23

20Roden Crater East Portal, 2003Photographimage 11 ¾ x 6 ½Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of ArtPhotograph by Florian Holzherr

21Roden Crater Bowl with Crater Plaza and East Portal, 2003Photographimage 6 ¼ x 9 ¾Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of ArtPhotograph by Florian Holzherr

22Roden Crater Looking North East, 1979Photograph, Ektachrome filmimage 7 ½ x 9 ½

Hallway and Spitaleri Gallery

Carbon Prints and Photographs of Roden Crater

23Site Plan (blueprint), 1983Inkjet print, 1/30image 21 ⅛ x 33 ⅛

24Site Plan (blueprint), 2013 Inkjet print, 1/30image size 46 x 54

25Roden Crater Looking North East, 1979 Photograph, Ektachrome film image 7 ½ x 9 ½

26Roden Crater Looking North, 1979 Photograph, Ektachrome film image 6½ x 9¾

27Roden Crater, Single from Stereo Photo Pair, 1983, with 2002 Site Plan OverlayPhotograph, Ektachrome film with Wild RC10 cameraimage 12 x 12

28Roden Crater, High Altitude Photograph, 1979Photograph, Photographed with Fairchild TI cameraimage 5 ½ x 5½

29Roden Crater Oblique Looking North, October 1979Photograph, Gelatin silver printimage 6 ½ x 9¾

30Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River, Oblique, 1979Photograph (carbon print), with Wild RC8 cameraimage 24 ¾ x 23

31Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River, 1982Photograph (carbon print), with Linhof Aero Technica camera image 23 ¾ x 23 ¾

32Roden Crater Looking East, 1979 Photograph (color carbon print), Ektachrome filmimage 23 ¾ x 30

33Roden Crater Aerial Photograph, 1982Photograph (carbon print), with Wild RC8 cameraimage 23 x 23 ¾

EDALUSD FOUNDATION, INC.

Exhibition Sponsors

Robert and Marsha LonerganThomas and Robin ClarkeThe Ravenal Foundation

Tim KaganFrank and Joan Kittredge

On the cover: Roden Crater East Portal, 2003, Photograph, 11 ¾” x 6 ½” inches, Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Photograph by Florian Holzherr

American artist James Turrell is one of the most multifaceted artists of our time and well known for working with light, color and space. A leader in this field, Turrell exhibits at many prestigious art museums around the world and has created permanent installations in close to 30 countries.

James Turrell Perspectives provides a context for understanding Turrell’s work. The exhibition has four components, installed in four ground floor galleries in the Academy Art Museum, including a room of holograms, a site-specific light installation, a selection of photographs and a set of bronze and plaster models.

In the museum’s Lederer Gallery Turrell and his team created a site-specific “aperture space” or “space division,” titled St. Elmo’s Light. In this work Turrell divides the room into two areas that he calls the “sensing space” and the “viewing space.” In St. Elmo’s Light, a partition wall with a rectangular opening divides the room. Lights aimed at the side walls of the sensing space create a reflective ambient light that dimly illuminates the viewing space. Standing in the sensing space, the viewer initially perceives the opening between the spaces as a flat surface, much like a rectangular, monochromatic painting hanging on what appears to be a solid wall. But after studying

it closely, a surprising shift in perception occurs - the rectangle opens up and becomes transparent, allowing the viewer to look into the space that lies beyond. Across the Atrium in the Healy Gallery Turrell’s holograms introduce visitors to ideas that have engaged him for decades: the duality of light, visual perception, dematerialization, the physical property of light, as well as the spiritual quality. Turrell encodes light with meaning. He uses holograms as a tool to create light in space; he presents the viewer with a form of light, some representing “outies,” seemingly protruding into the room; and “innies,” seemingly receding to the back. Holograms traditionally are optical objects used to make an illusion, where light becomes the means through which a three-dimensional object is depicted. Turrell uses holography to examine the phenomenon of the light itself; he lets it become the object.

In the museum’s central Atrium Gallery, the focus is on James Turrell’s Roden Crater, a cinder cone from a somnambulant volcano, with a remaining interior volcanic crater. It is located northeast of the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona. From the beginning the Roden Crater project related to earth artists in the 1960s and 1970s who undertook large-scale sculptures and land-art projects, like Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson.

Turrell acquired the 400,000-year-old, 3-mile-wide (4.8 km) crater’s land and has, since 1974, been transforming the inner cone of the crater into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing and experiencing of sky-light, solar, and celestial phenomena. The fleeting Winter and Summer solstice events will be highlighted. The magnum opus is still a work in progress and will eventually result into a monumental work of art and one of the most ambitious projects ever envisioned by an artist.

In this central space the exhibition features Turrell’s bronze and plaster models, evolved from spaces he built and designed within the Roden Crater and, like the crater’s chambers, contain skyspaces: apertures to the sky carved into an enclosed space. Visitors experience visual phenomena with the movements of the cosmos. Most of the photographs and carbon prints are taken by Turrell himself. He was an aviator at age 16, and is an avid sailor – a man who understands the movement of the sun, moon and stars, and how to find his way by their light. Since attending Pomona College, where he focused on psychology and mathematics, he also knows a lot about the brain, and how we unconsciously construct the ‘reality’ in which we live. Only later, in graduate school, did he pursue art, receiving an MFA from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California.

Turrell’s art is designed to help us catch sight of ourselves in the very act of seeing and to enable us to discover with refreshed eyes the everyday wonders of light. The exhibition focuses on Turrell’s fascination with both the mechanics of visual perception and the metaphysics of light and introduces our audience to recurring themes in Turrell’s oeuvre related to geologic time and his efforts to give viewers a direct experience with the cosmos.

Although often associated with the minimalist and land art movements that have been prominent since the 1960s, James Turrell also has an affinity with artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner who were compelled to represent light in a way that conveyed a greater meaning and something transcendent. He has been described as the last great American romantic artist, and his decades-long Roden Crater project has been likened to a Sistine Chapel in the Painted Desert.

Besides this exhibition at the Academy Art Museum three simultaneous and complementary exhibitions together offer a full sense of Turrell’s oeuvre, and explore different facets of his six-decade career. Independently curated by each presenting institution, these exhibitions offer an unprecedented range of his work—from a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (May 26, 2013 – April 4, 2014), to work from the extensive permanent collection and commissions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 9 – September 22, 2013), to a monumental site-specific installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (June 21– September 25, 2013). James Turrell and his wife reside in Arizona, New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The exhibition was organized by Museum Director Erik Neil and Curator Anke Van Wagenberg and was underwritten in part by the Dedalus Foundation, the Talbot County Arts Council and the MD State Arts Council, Ilex Construction, the Ravenal Foundation, as well as Thomas and Robin Clarke, Tim Kagan, Frank and Joan Kittredge and Robert and Marsha Lonergan. Anke Van Wagenberg, Ph.D., Curator

James Turrell PerspectivesApril 20 - July 7, 2013

Exhibition ChecklistAll artwork is by James Turrell unless otherwise noted.

Measurements given in inches, height precedes width.

James TurrellRoden Crater Aerial Photograph, 1979Photograph (carbon print), with Wild RC8 camera image 23” x 23 ¾”

James TurrellSt. Elmo’s Breath, 1992

Private Collection, Copyright James TurrellPhotograph by Florian Holzherr

Lederer Gallery

1 St. Elmo’s Light, 2013 Space Division

Healy Gallery

Holograms

2Origami, Aqua, 201155 ¼ x 40 ¼Two Planes, Artwork #1, 53502Produced by Matthew Schreiber and John Perry

3Butterfly Ellipses, Amber and Green, 200861 ½ x 39 ½29NIA+GProduced by Matthew Schreiber and John Perry

4Blue Green Ellipse Outie, 201223 ¾ x 17 ¼XXVIII A Produced by Bob Gaylor and Augie Muth

5Green Triangle Outie, 201224 ¼ x 16 ⅛XXX D Produced by Bob Gaylor and Augie Muth

6Triangle, Red, White and Blue, 200773 ½ x 39 ½24 ROR WBProduced by Matthew Schreiber and John Perry

7Planes, Amber and Orange, 200773 ½ x 39 ½14NOA+OProduced by Matthew Schreiber and John Perry

8Blue Green Triangle Innie, 201223 ¼ x 15 ⅜XXVIII B Produced by Bob Gaylor and Augie Muth

9Orange Green Triangle Outie, 201324 ¼ x 16 ¾XXXI A Produced by Bob Gaylor and Augie Muth

Atrium Gallery

Roden Crater Models

10Sun and Moon Space, 2008 Pair, bronze and plaster, 1/12 17 w x 8 ½ d x 9 ¼ h

11South Space, 2008 Pair, bronze and plaster, 1/12 17 ⅝ w x 8 ⅜ d x 4 ¾ h

12North Space Dark Chamber, 2008 Pair, bronze and plaster, 1/1217 w x 8 ½ d x 9 ¼ h

13East Portal, 2008 Pair, bronze and plaster, 1/12 27 ½ w x 10 ¼ d x 15 ¼ h

14Crater’s Eye, 2008 Pair, bronze and plaster, 1/1220 ½ w x 10 ¼ d x 5 ¼ h

Carbon Prints and Photographs of Roden Crater

15First 4 x 5 Photograph of Roden Crater, 1978Photograph, Photographed with Wista cameraimage 22 ¾ x 34

16U.S. Geological SurveyEarliest Known Aerial Photograph of Roden Crater, 1936 Photograph (carbon print), from USGS negativeimage 24 x 23 ¾

17Roden Crater, Single from Stereo Photo Pair, 1983, with 2002 Site Plan OverlayPhotograph, Ektachrome film with Wild RC10 cameraimage 23 ¾ x 23 ¾

18Roden Crater at Sunset, 1980 Photograph, Ektachrome filmimage 8 x 10