Four hours is a long way to drive for anything. And I don’t discount the great art that exists in the Upper Valley — it’s easier to visit Saint-Gaudens or even the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. But Storm King Art Center is reopening for the season, and you should make the trip.
Storm King was established in 1960 as a museum devoted to the Hudson River School painting, but soon became an enclave for modern sculpture. It occupies a special niche in the New York art scene — too far from the city to be touristy, too close to not belong to it.
In December, I drove to the 500-acre sculpture park with a childhood friend named Sam.
We were lonely there, bundled up in hats, scarves and mitts. In the shoulder seasons, the work at Storm King seems to expand, stretching across a bare sky. The sculptures become part of the environment. Distinction between bark and iron fades away into one architectural project. Tree limbs extend like sinewy fingers.
To me, this felt like the height of spirituality: art and rolling Earth. Storm King felt more like a church than a museum. To him, a math student, the geometries weren’t so religious.
Early in our walk, we encountered “Sea Change” by George Cutts. Two curved metal poles rotated around each other slowly, always near convergence. We stood in front of it for a long time. I watched the way the sun glimmered up the side of the poles. Light ricocheted back and forth, creating a dynamism between them.
“One’s going clockwise,” Sam said, breaking the quiet. “The other is rotating in the other direction.” I thought this was sort of a strange thing to say. I responded with a vague affirmation before letting us fall back into silence.
But he proceeded to say something similar at every sculpture, a little observation about its mechanics. He said he could only think of how to find the area of each. He tried to explain the “Fourier Transform” to me, but I couldn’t focus on it.
“I have dreams about math now,” he reported. “About math problems. I think I’m starting to lose it.”
I had been dying to visit because I have childhood memories of Storm King, running across Maya Lin’s waves in the summer. Seeing them in December, I was reminded of sunshine and digging around in dirt for ants. Sam only grunted about the angle of the hills’ inclines. Each sculpture provoked a contentious little battle between STEM and the humanities.
So, to the wayward Dartmouth student with a free weekend, make the drive. Try to bring a diversity of interests with you. I am curious to hear what the physicists and geographers, English majors and earth scientists might say.
Charlotte Hampton is the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth. She hails from New York, N.Y., and is studying government and philosophy at the College.
She can be reached at editor@thedartmouth.com or on Signal at 9176831832.
