Exhibit of the week: Maya Lin: Storm King Wavefield

Storm King Art Center

Mountainville, N.Y.

Permanent

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

For 50 years, Storm King Art Center has been among the nation’s foremost showcases for outdoor sculpture, said Roger Catlin in The Hartford Courant. Every summer, visitors admire the natural surroundings of the Catskill Mountains, as well as masterpieces by Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, and Isamu Noguchi, “each seemingly placed to correspond with not only the sprawling grounds but with the other monumental sculptures.” But the “newest and biggest” work at Storm King also “may be the most ambitious in its earth-moving serenity.” The seven rows of grass-covered hills that make up Maya Lin’s 4-acre Storm King Wavefield echo the rise and fall of the ridge behind them. Covered right now with short clover and pea grasses, it’s meant to change naturally with its surroundings over the next five, 10, 50, and 100 years.

“Like any landscape, it is a work in progress,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. But Storm King Wavefield, though just opened to the public, is “already a classic”—and probably Lin’s most significant work since the unforgettable design for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. Just as that memorial gradually surrounds its viewers with cold black granite, Storm King Wavefield envelops them in “rolling, swelling peaks” carved from the earth itself. When you’re in between two grassy hills, “you lose sight of all the other waves and of the larger prospects beyond them.” Your experience becomes entirely about what you can see, hear, and smell at that moment. “You’re encouraged to concentrate on the details of what’s around you,” and to do so with renewed attention.

If you come to Storm King Wavefield to be one with nature, you’re fooling yourself, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. Lin’s simplistic piece merely amplifies “the pleasures you get from crossing any pleasant piece of ground.” But her miniature mountain range doesn’t celebrate its wild surroundings so much as domesticate them. Storm King Wavefield “has the same relation­ships to nature as a doll’s house does to architecture.” Her regimented landforms may be intended to resemble ocean waves, but in reality they have all “the fussy human artifice” of a suburban golf course.