MOUNTAINVILLE, NY.- Storm King Art Center announced their 2026 exhibition schedule. New temporary commissions by Anicka Yi and Saif Azzuz will open to the public on Sunday, May 17, 2026, with a VIP preview on Saturday, May 16.

“The 2026 season is exemplary of what Storm King does best: championing artists as they expand the boundaries of their practice, commissioning works that unite sculpture and nature, and creating dialogue between the great mid-century artists in our collection and contemporary artists of today," said Storm King’s Executive Director Nora Lawrence. "Anicka Yi has long been an artist who I knew would enliven our landscape in ways we haven’t yet imagined. Saif Azzuz is creating a project that is also deeply rooted in the land and gives new life to found materials. It is an honor to realize these ambitious outdoor works."

Anicka Yi will present a major site-specific installation within a seven-acre field on Storm King’s grounds—the artist’s first large-scale outdoor project. Yi’s practice lies at the intersection of art, ecology, and technology, bringing together organic elements with human-made components. Arranged like an archaeological site with raw earth and partially exhumed structures, Yi’s installation will create a way for viewers to engage with concepts of geological time and evolutionary history through the lens of “prehistoric biofiction.”

Rising from a shallow pool like relics of a bygone ecological era will be series of interrelated Winogradsky columns: tall acrylic tubes that combine mud with sources of carbon and calcium to create observable communities of microorganisms. Through exposure to sunlight and time, a diverse array of algae, cyanobacteria, and bacterial colonies emerge in layers of vibrant colors, and are visible through the clear surface of the columns like abstract paintings. The artist sourced water and soil samples from Storm King’s ponds, resulting in cultures that are deeply site-specific and create a complex microbiological portrait of the genetic, bacterial, and geological makeup of the local landscape.

For the 2026 edition of Storm King’s Outlooks program, Saif Azzuz will present his first project outdoors: a nearly twenty-five-foot-long sculptural assemblage that will take the form of a giant sturgeon fish. An ancient yet endangered species, the sturgeon continues to inhabit the Hudson River as well as the Klamath River which runs through the Yurok reservation in Northern California. Composed of metal, natural materials, and acoustic elements, Azzuz’s sculpture reflects upon the sturgeon as a symbol of resilience and a native food source for the Yurok and Lenape peoples. Azzuz explores the interconnection between plants, animals, and people within his practice, drawing upon Yurok traditions of caring for the land to examine the effects of gentrification and colonialism on the environment. Launched in 2013, Storm King’s Outlooks exhibition series offers emerging and mid-career artists the opportunity to create a temporary large-scale project in the landscape.

Additionally, selections from Storm King’s permanent collection, including key works by Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, and David Smith, which helped shape the museum’s collection in the years after its founding, will be installed in the indoor galleries for the 2026 season.

Saif Azzuz (b. 1987, Born in Eureka,CA) is a Libyan-Yurok artist who resides in Pacifica, CA. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Working in painting, sculpture and installation, Azzuz’s work reimagines and examines our relationships to nature, privatization and commodification. The use of different mediums allows Azzuz to explore and question complex and often conflicting histories and social contexts of materials, weaving in untold narratives. His work reflects on the resilience of ecologies, first peoples and our collective need to view nature as an extension of us, in opposition to frameworks that view nature as a resource to be extracted. The artworks are portraits of interconnected living beings rather than depictions of a landscape that exists outside of us. Azzuz is represented by Anthony Meier in Mill Valley, CA and Nicelle Beauchene in New York, NY. Azzuz has had solo presentations at the ICA San Francisco and the Blaffer Museum, and his work is in selected public collections including the Rennie Museum, de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gochman Family Collection, Facebook, North Carolina Museum of Art, Kadist, University of St. Thomas, Stanford Health Care Art Collection, and UBS Art Collection.

Anicka Yi (b.1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American conceptual artist known for her focus on olfaction and her use of unorthodox, living, and perishable materials. Informed by scientific research, biology, and perfumers, Yi has produced a unique body of work over the past decade at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Her practice questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between what is human, animal, plant, and machine, and is the result of an alchemical process of experimentation that explores often incompatible materials. She collaborates with researchers to create media that are often inherently political and delves into the cultural conditioning of sense and perception in a way she describes as “biopolitics of the senses."

Her diverse installations, which draw on scientific concepts and techniques to activate vivid fictional scenarios, ask incisive questions about human psychology and the workings of society. Yi's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; among many others.