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James Turrell, a Los Angeles native, studied psychology and mathematics before receiving an MFA in art from the Claremont Graduate School in California in 1966. Turrell’s medium of art is light and he has spent his life learning how to manipulate it into an experience that can be shared with others. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes of Turrell, “His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light - the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.”

Turrell obtained his pilot’s license at 16 and flew supplies to mine sites in remote areas. In his many years of flying, he has witnessed firsthand how light affects perception and how reality is altered when there are no visible landmarks available to aid in identifying the surrounding space. Think about flying into a cloud formation or storm where the ground, sun, stars or any visual references we typically use to orient us disappear. There is nothing to indicate whether we are up or down.

Turrell uses a variety of techniques to manipulate a viewer’s awareness of light and space. He makes projection pieces that create illusions of objects with depth such as a cube that appears to be floating in the air. He manufactures light panels with slowly changing colors. He constructs light-filled tunnels, such as the “The Light Inside” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He creates rooms with changing colors of light that eliminate depth perception and cause the viewer to experience the “Ganzfeld effect,” a disorienting experience similar to being in a snowstorm white-out. He builds Skyspaces which are permanent installations in which visitors sit in an enclosed space and look up to an aperture to the open sky. Artificial lights mingle with the natural light allowing the viewer to perceive the movement of clouds and the changing colors of the sky in a hyper-focused way. Turrell’s most ambitious project to date is Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater he purchased in Arizona in 1977. He has been painstakingly transforming it into a massive, fully immersive astronomical observatory. 

James Turrell’s works may be found in countless public art collections and museums throughout the world including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.