About James Turrell

American artist James Turrell (b. 1943) is most closely associated with the 1960s California Light and Space Movement. A master of precise constructions that play with our perceptual capabilities, Turrell creates ethereal installations that invite viewers to experience "the material of light through the medium of perception" and encourage self-awareness and personal reflection.

The subject of over 140 exhibitions worldwide, Turrell's work can be seen in permanent installations at The Henry Art Gallery (opened July 2003), Seattle and the Nasher Sculpture Garden, Dallas (opened October 2003), as well as other major museums including The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; The Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston and P.S.1, Long Island City, New York. Turrell is the recipient of countless grants and awards, including a fellowship from the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Also a pilot and cattle rancher, the artist lives in Arizona.

In his early career, Turrell was a student of psychology and mathematics at Pomona College in Claremont, California where he also took several art and art history courses. After Pomona, Turrell continued his artistic pursuits at the University of California at Irvine (1965-66). Intrigued by the beam of light in art and art history slide lectures, Turrell spent much of his time at Irvine experimenting with projected beams of light. Turrell left Irvine, however, after one year. 

After a brief hiatus, in 1967 Turrell turned back to experimentation with projected light. Turrell's first documented work, Afrum-Proto appeared to be a three dimensional floating cube of light which, upon further inspection, revealed itself as merely projected bands of light. Later that year using the old Mendotta Hotel as his studio Turrell explored the interaction between light and space in a series now known as the Mendotta Stoppages. In these works Turrell projected light into empty rooms he had converted into pristine white cubes sealed tightly from the external world. Since Afrum-Proto and the Mendotta Stoppages, Turrell's oeuvre has concentrated on the manipulation of light in a controlled space.

James Turrell accentuates the transformative and perceptual effects of light. Influenced by his early studies in psychology, Turrell meticulously designs environments, often called Perceptual Installations, to explore the effects light and space have on perception and spatial understanding. Turrell's most prominent explorations into light and space include his skyspaces, freestanding enclosed observatories designed to alter and heighten the perception of the sky. Phenomenal in their own right, the skyspaces can be interpreted as studies for Turrell's most ambitious endeavor, Roden Crater.

Conceived shortly after Turrell lost his Mendotta studio space in the 1970s, Roden Crater is a 390,000 year old volcanic range located about forty miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona. Turrell is transforming it into a massive celestial observatory with a series of underground rooms, tunnels and skyspaces to frame seasonal and celestial changes. His massive celestial observatory and certainly his magnum opus piece, Roden Crater (at times described as an Earthworks piece in the tradition of Michael Heizer's City and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty) is distinctive for being completely incorporated within the natural environment.

Turrell's fifteenth skyspace is scheduled to open on the University of Illinois at Chicago's South Campus in the Turrell designed Gateway Plaza in November 2004. Located at Roosevelt Road and Halsted Street, UIC Skyspace will be a significant addition to Chicago's artistic landscape and an indelible link to Roden Crater.  

The UIC skyspace will be celebrated with the exhibition James Turrell: In Light at Gallery 400 of the university's College of Architecture and the Arts.