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“My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.”

James Turrell is an internationally acclaimed light and space artist whose work can be found in collections worldwide. Over more than three decades, he has created striking works that play with perception and the effect of light within a created space. His fascination with the phenomena of light is related to his personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which he characterizes as having a ‘straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime’. Turrell’s art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience and meditation.

Turrell began his artistic career in California in the early 1960s as one of the leaders of a new group of artists working with light and space. Over the past two decades, his work has been recognized in exhibitions in major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California and the Panza di Biumo Collection, Varese, Italy.

Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. His large-scale, often architectural works incorporate the complex interplay of sky, light and atmosphere in motion across expanses of ocean, desert and city. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, in order to oversee the completion of his most important work, a monumental land art project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years.

The artist will speak on Wednesday, January 23 at 7:00 pm in Lee Hall Auditorium on the MSU campus. The talk is sponsored by the Department of Art, MSU’s Office of the Provost and Office of Research, the School of Architecture, the College of Arts & Science and Shackouls Honors College .

For more information contact:

Kay DeMarsche, Head
Department of Art
PO BOX 5182
Mississippi State, MS 39762
Tel: 662-325-2970
Fax: 662-325-3850