Storm King Art Center unveils extensive renovation, new landscapes for sculpture and more

‘Sculpture is as free as the mind; as complex as life’, said the sculptor David Smith. Few institutions have embraced the freedom of sculpture quite so directly as Storm King Art Center, where the exhibition space is sprawling — 500 acres — and ever-changing, subject to the light and weather of the Hudson Valley. Founded by entrepreneurs Ralph E. Ogden and H. Peter Stern in 1960, Storm King began as a modest museum dedicated to Hudson River School painting but soon pivoted to monumental outdoor sculpture, beginning with the acquisition of 13 welded steel works by David Smith in 1967.

Today more than 100 works of large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions dot the landscape of the outdoor museum in New Windsor, New York, which is now the largest sculpture park in the United States. In May, Storm King celebrated the completion of a $53 million capital project and unveiled new commissions by Kevin Beasley, Sonia Gomes and Dionne Lee, as well as an Ellsworth Kelly exhibition.

Preserving the art and the view

Three years in the making, the capital project includes major relandscaping with five additional acres for art and programming, new welcome pavilions and the museum’s first dedicated building for conservation, fabrication, and maintenance. Named the David R. Collens Building, it will provide criticial workspace and support for commissioned artists to realise site-specific works. These developments mark a continuation of the institution’s longstanding environmental stewardship of its site and the surrounding landscape, both in the use of clean, renewable energy and in new plantings selected for climate resiliency.

Artists collaborate with nature

This season Storm King welcomes three commissions by contemporary artists, on view through 10 November. In the new Tippet’s Field (reclaimed from parking spaces) sits a monumental work by the multidisciplinary artist Kevin Beasley. Stretching 100 feet across four billboardlike triptychs made from cast-resin slabs, PROSCENIUM| Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection (2024–25) considers the political, cultural and environmental histories layered within the American landscape. Beasley encloses clothes, plants, seeds and farming implements within the resin as a material record of changes both seasonal and generational.

The photographer Dionne Lee created her first-ever outdoor sculpture, between the falling leaf and the surface of rock (2025), for Storm King’s Outlooks series, which invites emerging and mid-career artists to create temporary projects in the landscape. Lee’s sculptural work is a cyanotype created with the rocks in the park by applying a light-sensitive solution to their surfaces, which produces shades of rich blue when exposed to the sun.

In the museum’s indoor galleries and up in a nearby tree on Museum Hill, visitors will find tactile works by Sonia Gomes who stitches and binds found objects and natural materials in knotty, vibrant assemblages. The title of her outdoor installation, Ó Abre Alas! (2025), is grounded in her Afro-Brazilian heritage, referencing the opening float of a Carnival parade.

A fourth exhibition comprises two sculptural works by Ellsworth Kelly. While best known for his colour field paintings, Kelly made powerful three-dimensional works employing minimal shapes and industrial materials throughout his career, including his renowned ‘totem’ series from which Untitled (1996) hails. The 15-foot steel monolith is attended by three buoyant aluminium elements that make up Untitled (1982). The grouping is on view through 8 November 2027.

More sculpture gardens to check out

Pining for more art en plein air? Just 80 miles up the Hudson at Art Omi in Ghent, visitors can view recent outdoor commissions by Jimenez Lai, Beom Jun Kim, Pippa Garner at the art centre’s 120-acre Sculpture & Architecture Park, as well as a solo exhibition of Harold Stevenson opening on 28 June. An innovative conical pavilion designed by renowned architects SO-IL will add five galleries to the art centre in 2026.

Or consider a trip to see sculpture in the Prairies at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum in Hamilton, Ohio, or the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The former recently added a Deborah Butterfield to its landscape where monumental masterworks reside alongside an antiquities collection and the pyramidal house once inhabited by founder Harry T. Wilks. This fall the Meijer Gardens unveil their latest acquisition, a 26-foot-tall bronze by Nick Cave, which will stand alongside works by Auguste Rodin and Richard Serra at one of the most-visited sculpture parks worldwide.