Turrell, as one of its beneficiaries, would know. It does things that used to not be able to be done.” “I didn’t mean it as a challenge,” Turrell added. “I remember it more like, ‘If you guys ever pull this off, I’ll put a beautiful Skyspace in there for you,’” Thompson said with a grin. “I said to Joe, ‘If you’re going to do this, I’ll make a Skyspace there,’” Turrell said, matter-of-factly. James Turrell's 'C.A.V.U.' this week at Mass MoCA. One thing in particular struck Turrell’s eye: a giant, decommissioned concrete water tank, 40 feet in diameter and just as tall. One day, with Turrell in town for an exhibition at Williams College, the three men wandered the decaying site together. Krens, who would go on to become director of the Guggenheim’s global consortium of museums, had hatched the plan and brought Thompson in to lead it. (Turrell thinks it was 35 years ago Thompson wondered if it was actually 34.) Turrell, affable and wry, with a thicket of white hair and beard, cast back through the decades to when he, Thompson, and Thomas Krens toured the grounds of the old Sprague Electric complex, which would later become the Mass MoCA campus.

“Though once you’re inculcated,” Turrell said, “it never really leaves you.” (The Skyspaces may be partly inspired by the Quaker meetinghouse, where the gathered would sit in meditative silence until moved to speak Turrell made one for a meetinghouse in Houston in 2001.) Both were brought up in the Quaker tradition but now live far outside it. On Monday, Turrell and Mass MoCA’s recently semi-retired founding director Joe Thompson sat around a shaker table at the museum, dotted with an array of “lapsed Quakerware,” basalt-based black crockery made by Turrell and the Irish artist Nicholas Mosse. (When done, hidden lights in the dome will make the sky seem to change color at dusk and dawn.) It’s singular, both in scale - it’s the largest he’s ever made - and in its protracted coming-to-be. It was riveting.īut no Skyspace, existing or planned, matches C.A.V.U., the Mass MoCA edition set to open Saturday. The sky behind it seemed less a shade of blue than the definition of what blue really is. Sunlight haloed the undulating fringe of one drifting mass, leaving its thick middle dark and heaving.

The Skyspace aperture sharpened the sky in a tight edit: Slim wisps of cloud snaked and wound around each other in a primordial ballet. It was a day of completely ordinary natural beauty, until it wasn’t. Earlier, on my way to the museum, I noted contrails streaking the sky in numbers I hadn’t seen in a long, long time, the product of a travel industry emerging from pandemic slumber.

It was a bright late-spring morning, with heavy cloudbanks tumbling in the breeze over the rolling green of the Berkshire hills. I sat, surrendering to the precise incline of its gently sloping back, and let my eyes wander skyward to the crisp, circular opening cut dead-center in the ceiling overhead. The dark stone bench lining the circular space beckoned. I’d just finished a long, languorous conversation with artist James Turrell, who was now gamely posing for pictures inside his new, not-quite complete Skyspace installation at Mass MoCA. NORTH ADAMS - The whirr and grind of heavy machinery - a cement mixer, a backhoe, a skyjack, a stone saw - isn’t the typical soundtrack to enlightenment, but there it was.

James turrell mass moca