James
Turrell
(Los Angeles, CA, 1943)
James Turrell is an American artist, a pioneer of Environmental Art and a leading figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and '70s. For over three decades he has been investigating visual phenomena and perception, becoming a master in the use of pure light as a creative medium.
Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles into a Quaker family. He graduated from Pasadena High School in 1961 and studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, receiving a BA there in 1965. His Quaker upbringing, which exposed him to the principle of "inner light" and light as a metaphor for divinity, profoundly influenced Turrell's approach to life and art.
In 1966, he began working with light, space and acoustics in his Santa Monica studio at the Mendota Hotel. Known as Mendota Stoppages, these early works significantly informed his practice in the following years. Around the same time, the artist pursued his investigation into light and perception with the Cross Corner Projections, the first Shallow Space Constructions, and prototypes of the Wedgeworks series.
Between 1968 and 1969, together with artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Dr. Edward Wortz, he carried out a series of experiments on total perceptive fields (Ganzfeld) as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 'Art and Technology' program, which sought to bring together contemporary artists with the most cutting edge engineers and corporations of the day. On this occasion Turrell researched the functioning of human perception within controlled environments, the findings of which greatly influenced the development of his practice.
After receiving a Master's degree in Art from Clermont Graduate University in 1973, Turrell began to work on his first Skyspaces: a room with a large opening cut into the ceiling that frames the sky and alters the viewer's perception, especially of its depth. The first prototype Skyspace is in the Villa Panza.
After leaving his Ocean Park studio, Turrell won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation that he used to finance a series of exploratory flights over the Western states, looking for a natural site where he could continue his research for a "monument to perception". With funding from the Dia Art Foundation he purchased Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone situated in the Painted Desert in Arizona, which undoubtedly became his most ambitious project; for over thirty years, Turrell has been working to refine the site into a monumental observatory.
Since the '70s, the artist built a long-lasting and fruitful relationship with Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo who funded his first drawings for the Roden Crater, and also commissioned important site-specific works: Skyspace I, Skywindow I , and Virga (1974) for his house in Varese.
Turrell's work is represented in numerous public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. In 2009 The Hess Art Collection opened The James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina.
In May and June of 2013, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York concurrently presented three major exhibitions highlighting the artist's achievements.
In July 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded James Turrell the National Medal of Arts which goes "to individuals or groups who are deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the United States."
