James Turrell

James Turrell was raised in nearby Pasadena, and currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. He earned a BA in psychology and mathematics in 1965 from Pomona College in Claremont, California, then pursued graduate studies in the fine arts at the University of California, Irvine, and Claremont Graduate School, where he earned his MA in 1973.

Over the past forty years, Turrell’s groundbreaking experiments with light and spatial perception have revolutionized the visual arts. Since 1979, he has been transforming Roden Crater—the cinder cone of an extinct volcano in the Painted Desert of Arizona—into a multichambered, naked-eye observatory of celestial phenomena. Turrell also has created three-dozen of his more modestly scaled viewing chambers—known as skyspaces—for museums and other collections around the world, including Light Reign (2003) at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle and One Accord (1995–99) for the Live Oaks Friends Meeting house in Houston.

Turrell’s work has been featured in more than one hundred and forty solo exhibitions, such as James Turrell: Knowing Light (2003) and James Turrell: Sensing Space (1992) at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; James Turrell: Spirit and Light (1998) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; and James Turrell: Light Projections and Light spaces (1976) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Among his many awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1968), Guggenheim Foundation (1974), and MacArthur Foundation (1984).