Museums Renovate to Enhance the Experience of Art Through Nature

The pandemic brought those complaints to a head. “We found ourselves to be one of the first cultural spaces in the tristate area to reopen because of our ability to keep people outside,” she recalled. But, she said, “we were woefully underprepared.”

Previously, arriving at Storm King was more akin to arriving at a national park. Visitors were directed to one of three parking lots, depending on availability, and had a hard time finding each other or the art they wanted to see. She said she often saw people yelling into their cellphones, “‘I’m near the large red sculpture! Can’t you find me?’”

When Storm King opens for the season (May 7 to the public,), visitor parking will be on one large lot, with a path to a new welcome plaza that offers seating and Wi-Fi. There’s a new ticket office. An airy, low-slung building blends into the landscape and offers comforts like lockers, a lactation area and flushable toilets, which will mean fewer portable toilets.

She crossed the plaza where a grove of seven sweet gum trees will eventually form an overstory up to 75 feet high, providing visitors a shady place to pause at the first vistas of nature and art.

From there, an iconic black sculpture came into view. Lawrence said Storm King “always knew” that the first reveal for visitors to the property should be Alexander Calder’s “The Arch” — in the collection since the 1970s —because the monumental, biomorphic artwork set against the landscape announces, as she put it, “‘You are entering and here is what Storm King’s about!’”

A gaggle of geese descended toward the green of a new exhibition space, until recently a parking lot. “Once it became a field, we realized how completely central it was to our site,” Lawrence said. At some point, the newly christened Tippet’s Field may house a permanent installation, but this season it’s home to sculpture by the New York-based artist Kevin Beasley: large-scale resin slabs forming four triptychs measuring 100 feet (through Nov. 10). (Elsewhere on the property this season, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes has her first show at a U.S. art institution and artist Dionne Lee presents her first outdoor sculptures.)

“There’s no way to separate the works that you’re seeing at Storm King from the experience of being here,” Lawrence said. Now, though, she added, Storm King is able to provide an experience that “feels whole and special for people the entire way through.”