James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. He is considered the "master of light" often creating art installations that mix natural light with artificial color through openings in ceilings thereby transforming internal spaces by ever shifting and changing color.
Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory; and for his series of skyspaces, enclosed spaces that frame the sky.
Turrell was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in a Quaker family. He obtained his pilot's license at the age of 16 and later registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, flying Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet. Turrell's academic background includes a BA degree from Pomona College in perceptual psychology and further studies in mathematics, geology, and astronomy. He began experimenting with light projections during his time in the graduate Studio Art program at the University of California, Irvine, which laid the foundation for his later works.
Turrell's innovative use of light and space has earned him numerous accolades, including being named a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. His works, which explore perception and the nature of light, have been exhibited in major museums and public art spaces worldwide.
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles, California. His father, Archibald Milton Turrell, was an aeronautical engineer and educator. His mother, Margaret Hodges Turrell, trained as a medical doctor and later worked in the Peace Corps. His parents were Quakers.
One of his major inspirations to pursue art with light was an exhibit by Thomas Wilfred that he saw when he was 15. Turrell obtained a pilot's license when he was 16 years old. Later, registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he flew Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet. Some writers have suggested it was a CIA mission; Turrell called it "a humanitarian mission" — and that he found "some beautiful places to fly". For years he restored antique airplanes to support his "art habit".
He received a BA degree from Pomona College in perceptual psychology in 1965 (including the study of the Ganzfeld effect) and also studied mathematics, geology, and astronomy. The following year, Turrell enrolled in the graduate Studio Art program at the University of California, Irvine, where he began making work using light projections. His studies at Irvine were interrupted in 1966, when he was arrested for coaching young men to avoid the Vietnam draft. He spent about a year in jail. In 1973, he received a Master of Arts degree from Claremont Graduate University.
In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel, at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence. By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to come through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections. In Shallow Space Constructions (1968) he used screened partitions, allowing a radiant effusion of concealed light to create an artificially flattened effect within the given space. That same year, he participated in the Los Angeles County Museum's Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz.
In 1969, he made sky drawings with Sam Francis, using colored skywriting smoke and cloud seeding materials. A pivotal environment Turrell developed from 1969 to 1974, The Mendota Stoppages, used several rooms in the former Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica which were sealed off, with the window apertures controlled by the artist to allow natural and artificial light to enter the darkened spaces in specific ways.
In 1979, Turrell acquired an extinct cinder cone volcano located outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Since then he has spent decades moving tons of dirt and building tunnels and apertures to turn this crater into a massive naked-eye observatory for experiencing celestial phenomena.
A completion date for the Crater has been announced and pushed back several times since the 1990s. The last time Turrell or his team went on record talking about a completion date, the goal was 2011; but according to a 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times, "nobody volunteers a date any more". Roden Crater has been long shrouded in secrecy and access limited to friends of the artist, although fans have sneaked in without the artist's permission. More recently, a program was established by which devoted fans can gain sanctioned access by completing the "Turrell Tour", which involves seeing a Turrell in 23 countries worldwide, and during May 2015, Roden Crater was open to a select group of 80 people at a cost of $6,500 per person.
Although he works in the American desert, Turrell does not consider himself an earthworks artist like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer. "You could say I'm a mound builder," he said. "I make things that take you up into the sky. But it's not about the landforms. I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit." He added: "I apprehend light—I make events that shape or contain light."
In 2019, Turrell partnered with the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts to collaborate on the project, changing the name to the "ASU-Roden Crater Project." This collaboration hopes to employ the interdisciplinary resources of ASU to better use and maintain the project. ASU has already begun including the facilities into course curriculum, including one class titled "Indigenous Stories and Sky Science" taught by Professor Dalla Costa.
In the 1970s, Turrell began his series of "skyspaces" enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof. A Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof. As a lifelong Quaker, Turrell designed the Live Oak Meeting House for the Society of Friends, with an opening or skyhole in the roof, wherein the notion of light takes on a decidedly religious connotation. (See PBS documentary). His work Meeting (1986) at P.S. 1, which consists of a square room with a rectangular opening cut directly into the ceiling, is a recreation of such a meeting house. In 2013, Turrell created another Quaker skyspace, Greet the Light, at the newly rebuilt Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia.
In a New York Times article on L.A. collectors building skyspaces in their backyards, Jori Finkel describes a skyspace as a "celestial viewing room designed to create the rather magical illusion that the sky is within reach – stretched like a canvas across an opening in the ceiling".
In 1992, Turrell's Irish Sky Garden opened at the Liss Ard Estate, Skibbereen, Co Cork, Ireland. The giant earth and stoneworks has a crater at its center. A visitor enters through a doorway in the perimeter of the rim, walks through a passage and climbs stairs to enter, then lies on the central plinth and looks upwards to experience the sky framed by the rim of the crater. "The most important thing is that inside turns into outside and the other way around, in the sense that relationships between the Irish landscape and sky changes" (James Turrell).
In 2001, Turrell made a "sky room" and pool for Nora and Norman Stone in Napa Valley, in which visitors swim through a tunnel into the outdoor pool, where an aperture in the roof displays a perfect slice of sky.
Since 2009, Turrell's Third Breath, 2005 is part of the permanent exhibition of the Centre for International Light Art (CILA) in Unna, Germany. It is a camera obscura, consisting of two rooms: In the lower, cubic room (Camera Obscura Space), the visitor sees an image of the sky which is being reflected through a lens on the ground. In the upper, cylindrical room (Sky Space), the sky can be seen directly through a hole in the ceiling.