On 500 acres of woodland and rolling hills in New York's Hudson Valley sits the Storm King Art Center. This site of former farmland and gravel quarries is studded with monumental sculptures by Modernist giants like Alexander Calder and Mark di Suvero. In a sense, you could say the center's bucolic setting is itself a piece of work.
"One thing that we've always been engaged in since Storm King was founded in the 1960s is land conservation and environmental stewardship," said curator Nora Lawrence. "It's a little bit of untold history."That environmental legacy continues this spring with Indicators: Artists on Climate Change. The exhibition explores climate change's climbing temperatures, rising sea levels, and cataclysmic weather through the personal perspectives of 17 contemporary artists. "We're really asking them to look at it from their own interest point," said Lawrence. "It's going to help people see things anew."Surprises and provocations await throughout Storm King's sprawling campus. In Birds Watching, Chicago-based sculptor Jenny Kendler has reproduced nearly 100 eyes of local avian species that are now facing extinction due to climate change. Made of reflective aluminum, akin to what's used for traffic signs, the birds' eyes fix their audience in an accusatory stare."They're saying, 'What is your responsibility, essentially, for driving my entire species to extinction?'" asked Kendler, who is also the artist-in-residence at NRDC. Ironically, the birds are also objects of beauty, according to aesthetic codes that please the human gaze.