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The high terrain of the Walking Cane Ranch in north-central Arizona, between the Painted Desert and the Little Colorado River and the San Francisco Peaks, is astoundingly beautiful. Flaxen grasses dust black and red volcanic gravel, which rises in huge, soft mounds — extinct volcanoes, the newest of which last erupted in 1066.
James Turrell, 81, the owner of this ranch and one of America’s most beloved artists, calls it “a land between”.
“It’s between desert and alpine. It’s between the Indian culture and the white culture. For me, the most important thing is that it’s between earth and sky.”
We are driving in Turrell’s dusty Jeep down an unpaved road that winds towards what may be the most logistically and philosophically ambitious artwork of our time.
Turrell, whose hair and long beard are completely white, was eight years old when he first laid eyes on this place. On a road trip along Route 66 from Pasadena, California, the Turrell family scaled the nearby Sunset Crater, from the rim of which young James would have seen, in the distance, a smaller cinder cone — the Roden Crater — that would come to occupy most of his life. “Quite a view,” he says.
Turrell’s “Roden Crater Project”, to give it its full title, appears in practically every scholarly survey of American Land Art, despite the fact that it is unfinished, and very few people have seen it. Turrell spotted the crater again in 1967, when he flew across the western US in search of a suitable site for what he calls “a naked eye observatory”. He was able to purchase 40 acres nearby for $9,000; gradually, he bought up more land, eventually including the crater itself and the surrounding cattle ranch.
In his ninth decade, despite slowing down physically, Turrell is as busy as he’s ever been. His large-scale exhibition At One, at Gagosian Le Bourget, Paris, opened in October and runs until the summer. This year, he will also unveil major architectural projects in Aarhus, Denmark, and at the new DIB Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok, Thailand, and gallery exhibitions at Wadi AlFann in Saudi Arabia and Pace Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.
Since the 1960s, when he first experimented with installations of projected and natural light in his Santa Monica studio, light has been both Turrell’s medium and his subject. “I want to award light thing-ness, so we feel its substance,” he says. The crater, which will eventually include 27 “sensing spaces”, is the ultimate expression of his ideas. “This is an art that you don’t have to know much about art to appreciate,” he says.
Most of these spaces are stone, concrete and bronze chambers built into the cone’s scoria sides, admitting light from the sky through precisely positioned apertures. Turrell estimates he has shifted more than a million cubic yards of rock and earth around the crater, not counting the roads he has built (and, sometimes, subsequently erased).
Three long tunnels will pass through the crater’s sides; only one is completed. Every winter solstice, the light from the setting sun shoots down this nearly 900ft-long tunnel, and projects an image of our star on to a disc of almost flawless white marble 8ft across. Turrell agreed to let me see it.
Over the years, his gallery installations have evolved from simple geometric shapes of projected light to immersive “Ganzfeld” environments, such as the room-sized “All Clear” (2024) currently on view in Paris. The Ganzfeld effect is the experience pilots have in cloud, or skiers in a whiteout, when the horizon disappears and orientation is scrambled. (Turrell got his pilot’s licence when he was 16 years old, and owns five aircraft.) In “All Clear”, shoeless visitors climb steps into a rounded space, entirely bathed in gradually changing coloured light which emanates from hidden LEDs.
More monumental still are Turrell’s “Skyspaces”, pavilions with open ceilings that developed from his early trials cutting holes in the walls and roof of his studio. He realised that by isolating a patch of sky, he could alter its colour, depending on the light around the aperture. For Turrell, this was a philosophical, even spiritual revelation, as well as a perceptual one: the appearance of things we understand as external to us is actually created in our minds. “We give the sky its blue,” he once said. “If not, I would not be able to change it.”
One of his earliest and best-known “Skyspaces” is at MoMA PS1 in New York: its title, “Meeting” (1980-86/2016), acknowledged the meeting houses of Turrell’s Quaker upbringing. He has often quoted his grandmother, who instructed him that the purpose of meditation was to “meet up with the light inside”.
This year, Turrell’s largest ever “Skyspace” will open at ARoS, the museum in Aarhus, Denmark. “As Seen Below (The Dome)” is based on the Pantheon in Rome — “a pretty good space”, he allows, and a prime example of hypaethral architecture, in which the sky is designed to enter the building through a central oculus. (Greek temples also did this.)
At his studio in Flagstaff, about 40 minutes south of Roden Crater, Turrell employs a modest permanent staff of two: architects Udit Goel and David Maples, who have worked for him since December 2023. His wife, Kyung-Lim Lee Turrell, is also closely involved with all aspects of the studio. (Her brother Tony oversees the ranch and the Roden Crater site operation and maintenance.)
Rather than a laboratory for perceptual effects, his studio resembles an architect’s office, which is what it is, mostly. Maps and architectural sections of the crater are laid out on tables. Certain details, however, hint that this is no ordinary office, such as the bulky aerial camera he used to bolt on to his plane. Two meteorites, about the size of footballs, sit near flat sections of fossilised tree trunk, which Turrell tells me are 250mn years old.
He admits ruefully that his “moment of being an artist” typically occurs in the brief period between the construction of his installations and their opening to the public. “That’s what I live for, because I get to see things I’ve never seen before.”
Much of the rest of his time, in recent years, has been spent fundraising for the crater. Early on, support came from the Dia Art Foundation and patrons including Count Panza di Biumo and J Patrick Lannan Sr. At times, progress slowed down and Turrell subsidised the project by restoring vintage planes and cattle ranching.
Things picked up in 2013 when Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (and former director of Dia), organised a successful touring retrospective for Turrell. Govan took patrons out to see the crater, and many made donations.
Turrell has also focused on growing the market for his “comestible” artworks — things that can fit in collectors’ homes. Aside from prints and ephemera related to the crater, this typically means installations of translucent glass panels that fit flush into cavity walls, with LED lighting systems behind. These have become sought after by the likes of Kanye West and the Kardashian family; in 2019 it was announced that West had donated $10mn to the crater. In 2024, the rapper Drake also visited, after the 2015 video for his track “Hotline Bling” controversially plundered Turrell’s aesthetic.
“You can get a little bit of a shine on your ego from art. But I want to tell you, art’s not the biggest thing in this world,” Turrell reflects. “All you need to do is have somebody like Drake or Kanye come and talk about your work, and it blows up your website!”
If all the funding came through today, Turrell tells me, Roden Crater could be done in four to five years. (He made a similar estimate to New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, in 2003.) The foundations which now own the crater and the land around it are raising endowments that will support the site when it one day opens to the public. The studio will not discuss total costs, in part because inflation is still stretching budgets, but in 2019 it was reported that Turrell and the foundation aimed to raise $200mn over the following two years to complete the project, and that nearly $40mn had already been raised.
When finished, 32 “lodges” will accommodate guests; electric carts will move them around the site. There will be an intimate Japanese tea room in a spherical capsule, projecting soft light into cups on a fossilised wood tabletop. There will be a pool from which bathers can watch the sunrise. There will be a Mesoamerican ballcourt and an amphitheatre. There will be a space — almost finished — with a marble throne, from which visitors, at certain times, can peer through a tunnel at the star Arcturus, which Turrell explains is “pretty much at the centre of our galaxy”. (The tunnel is yet to be funded.)
Just before sunset, Goel drives me and three other visitors halfway up the crater to the “Sun | Moon Chamber” — a circular room dominated by a massive disc of white marble set in an even bigger upright wedge of dark granite. Somewhere far up the keyhole-shaped tunnel, assistants have wheeled into position a 6ft diameter crystal lens. We wait for the light.
The time Turrell has predicted it will appear comes and goes. Goel admits to feeling nervous — he has seen this phenomenon only once before, and fears it may not happen. Then, in the mauve-tinted gloom, a shard of light explodes below the stone, then swells to a shimmering white circle. Over the next few minutes, the image of the sun climbs upwards and across (inverted by the lens) then dwindles on the other side. We have witnessed the earth turning. “I want to bring the sun, I want to bring these objects, into our lived-in territories,” Turrell says.
Turrell thinks of his work as a process of self-realisation — “realising our celestial selves.” He embarked on “Roden Crater Project” as Russia and the US were locked in a costly race to put a man on the moon. “We don’t have to go to the moon — a lesser satellite of the Earth — to declare ourselves in space,” he says.
‘James Turrell: At One’, Gagosian, Le Bourget, France, to June 2025, gagosian.com. Fundraising is under way to complete construction on and open Roden Crater. rodencrater.com/support
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