Concrete is hard to sit on, but the absurdity is the point
In the rolling landscape of the Hudson Valley, Storm King Art Center has opened three summer installations that ask visitors to reckon with time in its many forms — ecological, historical, and cultural. Anicka Yi conjures a civilization that never existed from living soil; Liz Glynn petrifies the excesses of the Gilded Age in concrete; Saif Azzuz raises a steel sturgeon to honor peoples whose removal from this very land was anything but imaginary. Together, these works invite a rare kind of attention — the kind that lingers long after you've left the field.
- Three artists have descended on 500 acres of Hudson Valley terrain with works that refuse easy categorization, blending ecology, archaeology, and cultural memory into a single summer season.
- Anicka Yi's living soil columns are already shifting color as algae and microbes grow inside them, turning the museum grounds into a slow-motion experiment in invented deep time.
- For one day only on June 27, Yi transforms the site further still — into a prehistoric feast where chocolate masquerades as stone and cocktails taste of pond and forest.
- Liz Glynn's concrete ballroom furniture sits absurdly in an open field, daring visitors to sit on it and feel, in their bones, the cold weight of Gilded Age inequality.
- Saif Azzuz's salvaged-metal sturgeon stands as the exhibition's moral anchor, etched with indigenous imagery and built from the land itself to honor the Lenape people forcibly removed from it.
- All three works remain through November 7, giving the Hudson Valley's seasons time to work on them — and on the visitors who make the journey north.
When summer heat makes the city unbearable, Storm King Art Center offers a particular kind of relief: 500 acres of open sky and art that demands you stop and truly look. This season, three new installations arrive with ambitions that stretch across deep time, ecological science, and the weight of erased histories.
Anicka Yi's contribution is perhaps the most uncanny. Tall acrylic columns filled with soil and water from the museum's own ponds host living colonies of algae and microbes, shifting color and texture as the summer unfolds. Yi drew on an 1880s soil science method to build these habitats, framing them as monuments to an invented civilization — one reinforced by concrete engravings of imaginary technological fossils scattered underfoot. On June 27, she extends the premise into something edible: a one-day prehistoric feast called Before Skeletons, Before Teeth, where chocolate is sculpted into cascading rocks, cheeses mimic fungi, and a cocktail called Pond Water — ramp-infused spirits, celery juice, maple syrup, apple cider vinegar — cuts bright and sharp against the earthier courses.
Nearby, Liz Glynn has reconstructed the ornate ballroom furniture of a Gilded Age financier's Fifth Avenue mansion — entirely in concrete. The Louis XIV–style chairs and footstools are rendered with enough fidelity to fool the eye at a distance, but visitors who accept the invitation to sit will feel only cold, unyielding stone. The absurdity is the point: a strange mirror held up to the inequality that built the original ballroom.
The third work carries the season's most solemn charge. Saif Azzuz, a member of the Yurok tribe, has installed a large steel and aluminum sturgeon on Museum Hill, built partly from salvaged car parts sourced from the Hudson Valley itself. The sturgeon sustained the Lenape and other Native peoples whose presence here was ended by forced removal. Etched with birds, fir trees, and native plants, the sculpture holds deep history and personal inheritance in the same frame.
All three exhibitions run through November 7 — long enough for the Hudson Valley's weather to cycle through its full range of moods, and for visitors to find their own time among works that ask, each in its own way, what we owe to the past.
When the city heat becomes unbearable, the Hudson Valley offers a particular kind of escape—500 acres of rolling terrain, open sky, and the kind of art that makes you stop walking and actually look. Storm King Art Center, the outdoor museum that has anchored this landscape for decades, opens its summer season this year with three installations that refuse to stay in one register. They move between deep time and the present moment, between ecology and history, between what was and what might have been.
Anicka Yi's Message from the Mud stages an imaginary archaeological site. Tall acrylic columns rise from a shallow pool, filled with soil and water drawn from the museum's own South Ponds. Inside these pillars, algae and microbial colonies are growing—a living archive that will shift color and texture as the summer progresses, turning greens deeper, browns richer, as sun and weather work on the materials. Yi used a soil science method from the 1880s to build these habitats, creating what amounts to an ecological monument from an invented civilization. Walk the site and you'll find more of her invented past underfoot: concrete engravings of imagined technological fossils, fragments of a culture that never existed but feels, somehow, entirely plausible.
Yi extends this fascination with deep time into something more immediate and strange. On June 27, for a single day only, she and the collaborative studio Care of Chan are hosting Before Skeletons, Before Teeth—a prehistoric culinary experience that treats food as sculpture and sculpture as sustenance. The centerpiece is the Stone Altar, a banquet table where what appears to be cascading rocks and pebbles are actually chocolate. Butter mounds bloom with edible flowers. Cheeses mimic fungi. Layered trifles echo the columns from Yi's installation. The menu pairs these creations with a cocktail called Pond Water—ramp-infused spirits, celery juice, maple syrup, apple cider vinegar—sharp and bright against the earthy, salty richness of the food. It is, by all accounts, as sumptuous as it is strange.
In another field, artist Liz Glynn has taken a different historical route. She studied photographs of William C. Whitney's Fifth Avenue mansion—a Gilded Age financier's palace—and reconstructed the ornate ballroom furniture in concrete. The Louis XIV–style armchairs and footstools are rendered with such fidelity that from a distance they almost convince you they're upholstered in something soft. They are not. The concrete is hard, unyielding. But you're invited to try sitting on them anyway, to experience the absurdity of lounging on stone furniture in the middle of a field while geese wander past. It's a strange mirror held up to the staggering wealth inequality that built the original ballroom in the first place.
The third installation carries a different weight. Saif Azzuz, a member of the Yurok tribe, has placed a large steel and aluminum sturgeon on Museum Hill, constructed partly from salvaged car parts sourced from the Hudson Valley itself. The sturgeon is significant—it sustained the Lenape people and other Native American tribes whose presence in this region was erased through forced removal. Azzuz's sculpture, part of Storm King's Outlooks series for emerging and mid-career artists, is etched with text and images: flying birds, fir trees, native plants. The work holds multiple stories at once: the deep history of the land, the specific cultures displaced from it, the artist's own inheritance and connection.
All three exhibitions remain on view through November 7. The Hudson Valley's weather will likely swing wildly between now and then—heat waves and cold snaps, rain and drought. But there is time to make the trip north, to walk among these works, to sit on concrete furniture, to eat chocolate that looks like stone, to stand before a fish made of salvaged metal and consider what it means to honor a presence that was taken away.
Notable Quotes
The concrete is hard to sit on, but visitors are invited to try—a mirror held up to the staggering wealth inequality that built the original ballroom— Description of Liz Glynn's Open House installation
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
What draws you to Storm King as a place to spend a summer day?
It's the scale of it. You're not in a gallery looking at work on white walls. You're walking through actual landscape, and the art is part of that landscape—not separate from it. The sculptures are enormous. The sky is enormous. You feel small in a way that's clarifying.
Anicka Yi's columns seem to be about time in a very specific way—they're changing as we watch them.
Exactly. Most sculptures are finished objects. These are alive. The algae and microbes are growing inside them. In six months they'll look different than they do now. Yi is saying something about how the past isn't fixed either—it's always being reinterpreted, always shifting based on what we bring to it.
And then there's the food experience. That seems almost contradictory—art you eat, that disappears.
That's the point, I think. Food is the most temporary art form. It exists to be consumed. By making a feast that's also sculpture, Yi is playing with that impermanence. The chocolate rocks, the butter mounds—they're beautiful, and then they're gone. Like the civilizations she's imagining.
Liz Glynn's concrete furniture feels like it's making a statement about class and wealth.
It's not subtle about it. You have this Gilded Age mansion, this obscene display of wealth, and she's recreating it in concrete in the middle of a field. Then she invites you to sit on it. It's uncomfortable. That discomfort is the work.
What about Azzuz's sturgeon? That feels like it's addressing something real and painful.
It is. The Lenape were removed from this land. That's not ancient history—it's recent enough that the consequences are still being lived. Azzuz's sculpture acknowledges that absence. The text and images etched into it are saying: this matters. This presence was here. We should remember it.