Fall In The Catskills, Part 1: Storm King Art Center
Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY!
Let’s hear it for fall! Normally, I am a reluctant connoisseur of autumn. Yes, fall is great,but I am not one of those people who get really sick of light summer textiles before, say, November. More importantly, fall also heralds the onset of winter, which I hate with a burning passion. This year, though, I am enjoying it the hilt despite today’s awful East Coast drizzle. Although I’ve done the fall foliage thing in New England and the Midwest in prior years, this last weekend was my first chance to explore the local resources during a trip to the Catskills. Here are some of the highlights of our trip for folks looking to get out of the city this fall.
On Betsy’s recommendation, our first stop on the way north was the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville. What better place to go on a getaway with a sculptor? Storm King makes the perfect day trip, only an hour to an hour and a half north of the city by car. (For the shopping inclined, it also happens to be only ten miles past the high-end outlet stores at Woodbury Common, which are actually on the way. Seriously. We passed right by them twice.) Storm King showcases a large collection of American and European modern sculpture located outdoors on a rolling 500 acre property nestled in the hills below its namesake, Storm King Mountain. It also boasts a small museum building currently showing a Maya Lin exhibition entitled “Bodies of Water” (running through November 15). Luckily for the lazy, although it’s possible to walk the entire park, there’s also a free tram that you can pick up from stations all over the park, and get on and off as you please to do a survey of the collection or hop out to take a closer look.
A view from the museum building down the Sugar Maple Allee last weekend.
I am nothing like an expert on modern art of any kind, much less modern sculpture, but if you’re at all interested in art it’s well worth the visit. I loved it. I only have so much attention span for spending time in MoMA, but there is something very different about seeing monumental modern sculpture that you can stand under and crane your neck up at in a gorgeous natural setting. Crammed on top of each other in a museum gallery, modern sculpture can overwhelm and start to lose its impact. Here, on the other hand, each piece has the chance to stand on its own, and your mind can clear before you go on to the next piece. I was impressed to find that there were half a dozen names that even I recognized (Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Richard Serra), but the center as a whole was a huge education in a wide variety of styles of sculpture.
The Maya Lin exhibit was timed to accompany the opening of the permanent work “Storm King Wavefield,” a monumental work in earth and grass that is the third in Lin’s series of wave fields. Visitors weren’t allowed to walk on it last weekend, but it’s well worth a look:
As you can see, Storm King’s Allee of Sugar Maples was only starting to head toward peak color last weekend, so there’s still time to catch it in color before the season ends.
Tomorrow, foliage and farm stands!
