Storm King Rules for the Best in Outdoor Sculpture and Gorgeous Grounds

But why bring in colonialism, genocide, and the Lenape natives? They have nothing to do with the art.

N ew York City is still the center of the American art universe since the major art dealers and auction houses are based there and the city is the home of the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and dozens of other museums. Brooklyn is thick with artists and, of course, Manhattan’s thick with art-buying millionaires. Art’s everywhere, though, in this vast, creative country. New York State — beyond the five boroughs and suburban Westchester County and Long Island — is, on its own, an art mecca.

My story today starts a periodic series on the arts beyond Gotham and the burbs with Storm King Art Center, the outdoor sculpture park in New Windsor, about 60 miles north of the George Washington Bridge. Before the end of the year, God willing, I’ll hit Utica, Albany, Rochester, and Buffalo for art museums, and Saratoga for Skidmore’s museum and the horse-racing museum. I’ll cover the preservation and interpretation of heritage, too, heading to Kinderhook, where Martin Van Buren lived, as well as the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, which is the Smithsonian of comedy and the home of the Lucy Desi Museum. Grape-stomping, anyone?

Storm King is a 500-acre landscaped park displaying large-scale sculptures, many site-specific and under the open skies. It started conceptually in 1960 as an open-air art and music space but evolved through the 1960s into the ’70s as what has to be the country’s premier place for art in nature. Work by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, Sarah Sze, Maya Lin, and many others is installed on the open fields, among the wild grasses, or tucked in the woods. Storm King is a mountain looming on the west bank of the Hudson River near the park. Early-morning clouds surrounding it were thought to signal rain later in the day, so the locals called it Storm King.

I visited Storm King the first weekend it was open for the season, wanting to see clearer signs of spring after two late snowstorms in Vermont, two hours up the road. From the parking lot, we walked to a small visitor center on a hill originally built in Normandy-chateau style in the 1930s as a weekend house for a rich New Yorker. We walked through most of the park, though there’s an open-air tram with lots of stops for visitors to get on and off. It’s all low-key, which means visitors aren’t messaged to death. You bring your senses and, unless you spring for the easy-to-use, helpful $15 guidebook, which I’d recommend, you’re on your own. Each sculpture has a succinct tombstone label — artist’s name, title, date, and material.

The place is unique in scope, quality, and ambition, and I had a great afternoon. It’s suited to serious art lovers but also to families. Ralph Ogden, the founder and owner of a local factory that made industrial fasteners, bought the house and around 25 acres of land in 1959 and made the house into a gallery space, offices, and a shop. Sculptures near the house, which is on top of a small hill, are of the scale of the house, so not too big. Two cedar sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard (b. 1942) start with four-by-four-foot lengths of cedar wood that she stacked and then sculpted with a circular saw. They’re delicate yet rustic, elegant yet hacked. Sarah Sze (b. 1969) made Fallen Sky in 2021, so it’s a new acquisition. It’s 132 mirror-polished stainless-steel chunks placed flat on the uncut grass so it seems that the sky — clouds are reflected in the steel — and land have collapsed into each other.

I walked from the house down the hill through a newly installed allée of black gum trees, a hardy, native species. The views are sweeping, with the sculpture titans in charge now. Mark di Suvero (b. 1933) and Storm King seem to be part of the same art epic. His Pyramidian, from the early 1990s, soars in the distance, with the line of trees creating a wispy foreground of bare branches.

Di Suvero goes back to Storm King’s early days. His material is steel, used to make forms that are big and open, like Storm King’s spaces, but they don’t mimic the landscape. Like the Pyramids or classical Greek temples, they’re human assertions over the landscape. The land provides the perfect setting. Against blue skies, which I didn’t have when I visited, di Suvero’s work must startle.

The sculptor David Smith (1906–1965) was there in Storm King’s fledgling days, too, though he’d been dead for two years when Ogden visited his studio near Lake George, N.Y. Lots of Smith’s work was made for outdoor display, and Ogden saw the possibilities. His stainless-steel work glittered and, of course, changed with the weather. Smith’s work sold Ogden on a sculpture-park art center. He bought a lot of Smith’s work, and I loved seeing it. He’s the art historian’s sculptor, as tied as he was with the movements that propelled American art through the 20th century, from Picasso and the Russian Constructivists to Pollock and Barnett Newman. What Ogden bought is both human-scale and elegant. It’s peak Modernism. Later sculptors went big, and that’s no crime since the big things at Storm King are great, but they started by looking at Smith, his materials, and his love for outdoor art.

Big works such as di Suvero’s, Alexander Liberman’s, and Calder’s are palpably industrial, though Liberman (1912–1999) and Calder (1898–1976) are more biomorphic. Calder is most famous for his small, floating stabiles in the 1940s and giant variations of them in the ’70s, and the big sculptures at Storm King are very beautiful, but Liberman is the more arresting artist and has a more unusual personality.

His three steel-tube sculptures, two painted red, use dramatic and unlikely cantilevers. They’re placed closer to trees, which both leaven them and amplify Liberman’s reference to cathedral architecture. They’re works by mere mortals meant, like churches, to help us understand the part we play in God’s world, which includes nature. Liberman was a very good artist, but he was, as his day job, the art editor of Vogue and, later, the editorial director of all Condé Nast publications.

Running along Storm King for a stretch is the New York State Thruway. The tranquility of Storm King doesn’t make the cars slow down. They zoom along, but the contrast makes them look and feel like spaceships. The sculpture seems more fixed, and ancient, like the Pyramids, or from prehistoric times, since, highway or no, Storm King is bucolic. The rolling land, woods, and wild grasses are all sculpted. Parts of Storm King were farmed. It was deforested long ago. Part of it was a gravel pit. Over the decades, Storm King bought more land specifically with sculpture placement and vistas in mind.

I love Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall from 1997. Goldsworthy (b. 1956) and his team of British wallers built a 2,278-foot, low fieldstone wall snaking through the woods. Stone walls aren’t ubiquitous in rural New England and Upstate New York, but early farmers did build some from stones exhumed when the land was cultivated. Goldsworthy incorporated remnants of old walls. Once the original walls were built as boundaries, trees grew around them. His new wall now snakes around these trees, many now old themselves and some planted during Storm King’s development. It’s a lovely connection of past to present. They’re also a lot of steel at Storm King, so stone is a nice balance.

There were so many surprises. I didn’t know Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) made sculpture. He did three, and one is at Storm King — Petaloid, from 1967 or so, a three-dimensional version of his sunburst paintings and good to discover. George Cutts’s Sea Change, from 1996, also tucked in the woods, is made from two slender, curving steel poles that sway in the breeze and are meant to suggest seaweed underwater.

I didn’t know the Chinese sculptor Zhang Huan (b. 1965), but his Three Legged Buddha, from 2007, has presence, and, even from a distance, I knew I wanted to see it. It’s a 28-foot-tall steel-and-copper sculpture based on a Tibetan Buddha that Zhang once saw. He inverted it, so the torso, legs, and feet are on top and the head is on the ground, with one foot resting on the top of the skull. It’s very strange, but Storm King has dozens of aesthetics and displays work by artists all over the world.

I wouldn’t call Zhang’s work whimsical, but Tal Streeter’s 64-foot Endless Column, from 1968, the tallest object at Storm King, is close. Made from painted steel, it’s an engineering feat and, I’ll admit it, reminds me of a gangly teenager. And Johnny Swing’s Nickel Couch, from 2001, is both whimsical and mercenary and immerses art in everyday life. A sinuous wing chair made from 6,400 nickels, it’s actually comfortable, though, on an overcast April day, it made for a chilled derrière. As a work of art, it’s so good, I didn’t mind.

Some of the sculptures work less well than others. In Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, from 1989, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) started with four monumental oak casting models for engines for ships, turbines, and other machines she found at a French weapons manufacturer near Lyon in France. She trimmed the forms until the swelling shapes looked like the human stomach.

I was intrigued. They’re products of the machine age, but they look archaic and totemic. War is always changing as technology changes, but war itself is as old as humanity and as instinctive as hunger. And the French are as belligerent as they come. Abakanowicz was Polish, and from an old, ennobled Polish family descending from the Mongol warlord Abaqa Khan, and, of course, Poland has never been a slouch at getting invaded in war. Alas, the sculptures are encased in glass and steel, which ruins their impact. They beg to be let free and fill the fields with growls, like a stomach or like the yen for war that needs to be fed. Made of wood, though, they’d deteriorate. Her theory is good, but the material she selected makes the idea a bad one.

Alice Aycock’s Three-Fold Manifestation, from 1987, is based on ancient Greek theaters but looks like three aboveground pools arranged in a tier. Roy Lichtenstein is famous, I know, but his Mermaid, from 1994, is at the point where art meets recycling. It was once a functioning racing boat painted in his characteristic cartoon style and depicting a mermaid. Cheery, it probably looks its best in the snow, though that’s when no one visits.

Storm King does temporary exhibitions and publishes distinguished, scholarly books. Arlene Shechet: Girl Group opens in May. She’ll debut six new, large-scale outdoor sculptures in vibrant pink, orange, blue, green, purple, and yellow. It’s another reason to visit, and the exhibition runs until November.

Storm King is wonderful, and, by now, it’s historic, since I think it’s the first outdoor sculpture park in America. There are a few now, such as the Olympic Sculpture Park, which is part of the Seattle Art Museum, and the deCordova in Lincoln, Mass., near Boston. Storm King is the gold standard, though, and proves how various the arts are outside of the city and how much quality there is.

When I write about art spaces, I always look at the list of trustees and the governance page of the website to see who’s involved, much as I always look at the donor walls. It’s a habit from my days as a museum director, when raiding donors was certainly not beneath me, though I would call it sharing the wealth. These days, I’m focusing on the ubiquitous, oily diversity, inclusion, and equity plans as well. It’s a rhetorical feat to flagellate an institution while also being smug about it. I read land acknowledgments, too. Most museums slap them on their trustee page. You’d think the trustees would prefer that something so phony would go someplace else — maybe a trash bin.

“We acknowledge that this is Lenapehoking,” Storm King’s statement weeps, “the ancestral home of the Lenape, who were forced from this land through colonialism and genocide.” No, it ain’t Lenapehoking. It’s New Windsor, N.Y., or, if you want to think big, it’s part of the greater Poughkeepsie metropolitan area. It’s no more Lenapehoking than Istanbul is Constantinople, which means the capital of half the Roman Empire, which finally went out of business in 1453.

“Forced from this land through colonialism and genocide” is history Hamas-style, which means fake and incendiary as well as, obviously, irrelevant to a sculpture park. The Lenape tribe, or tribes, weren’t beacon lights of Quaker peace, and “colonialism and genocide” are so freighted and entangling that Storm King needs to explain precisely what its trustees are deploring. As Sergeant Friday said, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and hold the cant.

But, Storm King trustees, if you think it’s Lenapehoking and believe that the Lenape “were forced from this land through colonialism and genocide,” then give the land back. Bring the sculptures to Bennington County in Vermont, where I live. Not even the natives wanted the county, pretty as it is.

Trustees agree to a land acknowledgment because it’s a cheap way to placate left-wing staffers, and, goodness, it’s better than slapping the race-hustling hate group Black Lives Matter on the home page of the website. What they’re condoning, though, and what they’re peddling is self-hatred and guilt, and they’re enlisting their visitors in this flimflam. Not a great way to profile Storm King as a place for culture and education, two things for which Lenapehoking was not renowned.

The trustees have consented to a blot on the landscape and their institution. Stick to art, which doesn’t mean staying clear of political art. Everything at Storm King should begin with the art and be rooted in art. The land acknowledgment, coming directly under the list of trustees, springs from the pop catechism of minds bored with art. Ditch it.