Storm King Art Center

Storm King Art Center, in the Hudson Valley north of New York City, is a landscape of about 500 acres in which very large sculpture and open ground were made for each other. Rolling meadows, woods and hilltops are set with works by some of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, and the long ridge of Schunnemunk Mountain forms the backdrop to many of them. The pleasure here is scale and distance: a piece seen first as a mark on the horizon becomes, after a long walk across the grass, something to stand underneath.

It began modestly. In 1958 Ralph E. Ogden, retired from his family's Star Expansion Company, bought an estate at Mountainville, and in 1960 opened it to the public, at first with the idea of a museum for Hudson River School painting and a few small sculptures he had bought in Europe. The turning point came in 1967, when he acquired thirteen works from the estate of David Smith. After Ogden's death in 1974 his former business partner Peter Stern led the center and brought in many of its best-known pieces; in 1975 five monumental works by Mark di Suvero, about to be dismantled after a show at the Whitney Museum, were brought here instead and still stand in the South Fields. In 1985 the company donated 2,300 acres on Schunnemunk Mountain, protecting the view, and another hundred acres of farmland for new works.

The land itself is part of the art. The plateau around the 1935 house built to resemble a Norman château, now the museum building, had been gutted in the 1950s by bulldozers digging gravel for the New York State Thruway, and it was rebuilt when the center was founded; since then the ground has been reshaped again and again for particular works, first by the landscape architect William Rutherford and later by the center's own leadership. The collection runs from Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson and Richard Serra to Magdalena Abakanowicz, Andy Goldsworthy, Sol LeWitt, Martin Puryear and Roy Lichtenstein. One of the most striking newer pieces is Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield of 2009, seven long rows of undulating earthworks that rise and fall like a swell on open water.

The grounds divide into four areas worth exploring in turn: the North Woods; Museum Hill above Moodna Creek, with views over the whole site; the Meadows near the entrance; and the broad South Fields. Bicycles can be rented to cover the distances, and a tram loop helps those who prefer not to walk.

Getting there

Storm King is in Mountainville, New York, about an hour's drive north of Manhattan. Newburgh is about 10 km away, and New York Stewart International Airport (SWF) is about the same distance. Coach USA runs round-trip buses from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan; Metro-North trains from Grand Central reach Beacon, about 30 minutes away by car, with a shuttle package from the station; and NJ Transit trains stop at Salisbury Mills-Cornwall, about ten minutes' drive away.