This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
Eastern redbuds. Sourwoods. Flowering dogwoods.
These spring-flowering trees are bursting with green among some 650 newly planted saplings greeting visitors to Storm King Art Center this spring. As the 20 native species of trees bloom and grow, they will provide shade for five acres of newly converted land, along with 10 species of shrubs and 60 species of ground covers and perennials. Much of the greenery is clustered around a new centralized entrance built to ease and enhance arrival to the 500-acre sculpture park in Orange County, N.Y.
Dia Beacon, in Dutchess County, N.Y., is completing a similar greening, creating a swooping new landscape of native meadows behind the art museum, like a mullet. The project will open to the public another eight acres of Dia’s 32-acre campus on the banks of the Hudson River.
And the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. has recently expanded and revamped its sculpture garden, which comprises two-thirds of the three-acre campus.
The updates at this trio of art institutions — all easy day trips for art- and nature- lovers from the New York City area — were spurred by lessons from the pandemic, feedback from visitors, a commitment to enhancing biodiversity and environmental protections linked to the climate crisis. The projects are part of a broader trend in which museums are using fresh ideas in landscape architecture to transform their spaces artfully.
THE ALDRICH
“We are so excited to welcome visitors now that spring is here,” said Cybele Maylone, the director of the Aldrich. Because of project delays, the revamped campus wasn’t finished until November, she explained, “the week before it started to snow!”
The pandemic pushed the museum, founded in 1964, to change. “During that very scary time we saw use of our sculpture garden dramatically increase, as visitors came to the museum to be together and to be with art,” she recalled. But, she said, “we received extensive visitor feedback” with complaints about inaccessibility: the garden — only accessible by stairs — had uneven terrain, few paths and no benches.
The Aldrich, which is Connecticut’s only museum solely dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art, had long been wanting better space for outdoor sculpture. Many artists, Maylone said, “want to work both indoors and outdoors in the public realm.”
A turning point was a project with the artist Cecile Abish, who uses a wheelchair: “To get to the garden we needed to take her through the museum’s basement and out through our loading dock,” Maylone recalled, “It threw into sharp relief how urgent this work was.” Maylone estimated that the renovations have made 50 percent more of the property usable. New features include an outdoor stone amphitheater, 100 new trees, walkways lined with native pollinator plants, ample seating and an enhanced sense of discoverability, with sculptures nestled into several shady alcoves.
Visitors can catch the outdoor exhibition “A Garden of Promise and Dissent,” with works by eight intergenerational artists, including three by Maren Hassinger, through April 12, 2026.
“There are green things popping up all over. It is starting to become the environment that we hoped it to be,“ Maylone said.
DIA BEACON
As at the Aldrich, a much larger fraction of Dia Beacon’s campus is open, although its light-filled exhibition building in a former Nabisco box factory still dominates the front of the property.
Sara Zewde of the landscape firm Studio Zewde said that four or five acres of lawn sat behind the museum, untrodden even by most of the museum staff. “It was pretty flat, both metaphorically and literally.”
On a back patio with views of the Hudson River, Zewde spoke to a group gathered for a summit last month organized by the nonprofit Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Dia had discouraged designers “from thinking about the project as a sculpture garden, with pedestals of art out here,” she said, “even though at any point artists may be inspired to make work and site it in this new landscape.”
The original landscaping — largely in the front of the building — turns away from the Hudson, giving it a bit of side eye. In the back, Zewde wanted to reorient the property toward the river “in its consideration of water.” Her team turned flat lawn into undulating berms that “move your eye and move your body toward the river.” The berms are planted with more than 90 native species to create meadowlands, along with nearly 400 new trees and shrubs throughout the property.
The change required some re-engineering to add significant storm water resilience, diverting any water that might pool and potentially flood the museum, — as it had in a minor way during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Zewde’s research for the project included conversations with Indigenous scholars and with the space and light artist Robert Irwin, who designed Dia Beacon’s property, which opened as a museum in 2003. (Irwin died in 2023.)
“Dia as an institution was grappling with Indigenous legacies of land and their role as an institution,” she added, “We really braided all of those things together: the water, the pressure of water, the pressure of institutionality and then the idea of expanding the museum experience.”
She noted that “meadows take years to reach their exuberant character,” so while the new terrain is expected to open in July, “it’ll be a process.”
STORM KING
Unlike the Aldrich and Dia Beacon, Storm King is fundamentally an outdoor experience. Its renovations, by far the biggest since its founding in 1960, are geared toward enhancing conservation and the ease with which visitors can enter and engage with the campus. Five project partners from New England, London and Dublin completed the updates.
Nora Lawrence, who has worked as a curator for Storm King since 2011 and became executive director last year, toured the grounds on a recent foggy day.
Lawrence said that Storm King had long wanted to solve visitor complaints about getting onto and around the property and bathroom access. Busy summer weekends meant long waits in one’s car and traffic backing up into local roadways.
The pandemic brought those complaints to a head. “We found ourselves to be one of the first cultural spaces in the tristate area to reopen because of our ability to keep people outside,” she recalled. But, she said, “we were woefully underprepared.”
Previously, arriving at Storm King was more akin to arriving at a national park. Visitors were directed to one of three parking lots, depending on availability, and had a hard time finding each other or the art they wanted to see. She said she often saw people yelling into their cellphones, “‘I’m near the large red sculpture! Can’t you find me?’”
When Storm King opens for the season (May 7 to the public,), visitor parking will be on one large lot, with a path to a new welcome plaza that offers seating and Wi-Fi. There’s a new ticket office. An airy, low-slung building blends into the landscape and offers comforts like lockers, a lactation area and flushable toilets, which will mean fewer portable toilets.
She crossed the plaza where a grove of seven sweet gum trees will eventually form an overstory up to 75 feet high, providing visitors a shady place to pause at the first vistas of nature and art.
From there, an iconic black sculpture came into view. Lawrence said Storm King “always knew” that the first reveal for visitors to the property should be Alexander Calder’s “The Arch” — in the collection since the 1970s —because the monumental, biomorphic artwork set against the landscape announces, as she put it, “‘You are entering and here is what Storm King’s about!’”
A gaggle of geese descended toward the green of a new exhibition space, until recently a parking lot. “Once it became a field, we realized how completely central it was to our site,” Lawrence said. At some point, the newly christened Tippet’s Field may house a permanent installation, but this season it’s home to sculpture by the New York-based artist Kevin Beasley: large-scale resin slabs forming four triptychs measuring 100 feet (through Nov. 10). (Elsewhere on the property this season, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes has her first show at a U.S. art institution and artist Dionne Lee presents her first outdoor sculptures.)
“There’s no way to separate the works that you’re seeing at Storm King from the experience of being here,” Lawrence said. Now, though, she added, Storm King is able to provide an experience that “feels whole and special for people the entire way through.”
The post Renovating the Outdoors to Enhance the Art Experience appeared first on New York Times.
