MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y.- Storm King Art Center, one of the world's most distinguished and best-loved sculpture parks, opened to the public for its 2011 season on April 1. Located about an hour north of New York City, in the Hudson Valley, Storm King encompasses over 500 pristine acres of rolling hills, fields, and woodlands. These provide space for more than 100 large-scale sculptures by some of the preeminent artists of our time, including Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Maya Lin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, David Smith, and Ursula von Rydingsvard, among others.

Highlights of Storm King’s 2011 season include two special exhibitions organized in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, on view for their second and final season. Other special offerings include: Zhang Huan’s colossal Three Legged Buddha (2007), a recent addition to the collection that is on view for its first full season, and Sit Down, a work by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren that has been refabricated and reinstalled. Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield (2007–2008), the sculpture park’s latest commissioned work, is on view for its second season, and has already become a visitor favorite.

Anniversary Exhibitions
5+5: New Perspectives, installed across the Storm King grounds, comprises a wide variety of new and recent work by ten artists. Five of them—Alice Aycock, Chakaia Booker, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, and Ursula von Rydingsvard—are represented in Storm King’s permanent collection, while John Bisbee, Maria Elena González, Darrell Petit, Alyson Shotz, and Stephen Talasnik are new to Storm King. Each artist worked with Storm King Director and Curator David R. Collens to select locations throughout the sculpture park’s expansive, landscape in which to site their work. The sculptures can thus be appreciated both for their intrinsic value and in relation to nearby works from the collection.

Visitor maps are available to help guests identify both the works in the 5+5: New Perspectives exhibition and those in Storm King’s permanent collection.

The View from Here: Storm King at Fifty, installed in the Museum Building, explores key aspects of Storm King’s rich history, including the development of its collection and the creation of its carefully cultivated landscape. Artworks, photographs, and documentary materials, along with video and digital content, combine to offer a compelling narrative of Storm King’s first 50 years, illuminating its unique place in the contemporary art world and looking toward its future. Many new documentary materials have been added for the 2011 season.

Three Legged Buddha
Acquired as a gift from the artist and The Pace Gallery, Zhang Huan’s monumental Three Legged Buddha represents the bottom half of a sprawling, three-legged behemoth, one of whose feet rests on an eight-foot high human head that appears to be either emerging from or sinking into the earth. Standing nearly twenty-eight feet high and weighing more than twelve tons, it is part of a series of monumental works inspired several years ago by the artist’s encounters, while traveling in Tibet, with remnants of Buddhist statuary that had been destroyed during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–ca. 1971).

Sit Down
Newly installed this season is Sit Down, a multi-part work by French artist Daniel Buren, comprising ten green-and-white-striped benches in the form of rectangular boxes. Commissioned by Storm King in 1998 and originally made of painted plywood, the benches have been refabricated in aluminum. They have been carefully sited so that each bench is in view of one more, encouraging visitors to move from one to the next. One of the original benches is on display in the Museum Building.