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Sculpture occupies an odd place in contemporary art. Because of their sheer physical presence, sculptures are often harder to show, not to mention more difficult to sell: This fact forces the medium into a secondary role behind painting, especially in a business so obsessed with the markets. And yet, sculpture is arguably the art that the public, throughout history, has tended to interact with the most, even if we’re not always paying it much attention. Sculpture is an indelible part of the global landscape. It’s in our public plazas, our corporate office parks. Celebrated (and often meticulously preserved) as a form of creative expression across the world, sculpture goes back to the prehistoric age, to early peoples’ use of stone flints to carve anthropomorphic figures out of mammoth ivory. Every culture since has made its own totems, sometimes to mark its triumphs and tragedies, and sometimes for reasons that are less clear.

To choose the 25 most important works of sculpture made since 1945, we asked a panel of experts to gather at the New York Times building in March. They included the artists Firelei Báez, 45; Charles Gaines, 82; Adam Pendleton, 42; and Arlene Shechet, 77 — each of whom has, to varying degrees, explored and advanced sculpture in their work — along with Ruba Katrib, 44, the chief curator of MoMA PS1 in Queens and the former curator of the nearby SculptureCenter, the only museum in New York explicitly dedicated to the medium. Any task that ends in anointing something “the most important” is highly subjective and should be considered with a heavy dose of skepticism; a different group would have come up with different selections, and it’s easy to imagine the following list turning out differently had this same group met at a different time on the same day.

But while this was an exercise with disagreement baked into its premise, as moderator I was surprised at our sheer level of divergence about what makes a sculpture significant. I was likewise (pleasantly) surprised at our ability to make compromises and concessions. Each member of the jury submitted a list of proposed inclusions before our meeting, and each had to let go of a favorite: Báez lost the battle to include Simone Leigh’s 2022 installation at the U.S. pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Katrib a passionate argument for Niki de Saint Phalle. I was disappointed at how quickly Michael Heizer’s 1969 land art masterpiece “Double Negative” was dismissed by the group. (Fans of Alberto Giacometti, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Barbara Hepworth and Elizabeth Catlett will also surely notice their absences here.) There was a good deal of back-and-forth about which Kara Walker sculpture to include; we eventually had to put the matter to a vote that never felt quite resolved. Our most heated debate revolved around Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C., and whether such a work — a monument, commissioned by the U.S. government — should be considered sculpture at all. (No, we finally decided; the most important monuments should be a different list altogether, but we also had to put Lin to a vote, and then to a follow-up vote.)

Beyond that, our definition of sculpture was generally broad. We would consider works from any country, though our choices display a clearly Western (and New York-centric) bias. We would weigh not just individual three-dimensional objects but group exhibitions and works skirting the line of other media, up to and including those centered on the human body as it moves through space. In fact, one of the few things the panel seemed to agree on implicitly is that a sculpture can be anything interacting with its environment, whether that’s an enormous steel structure by Richard Serra or, in the case of the Pope.L, a video of a performance, filmed over nine years, in which the artist periodically crawled along Broadway in New York City until he’d finally completed the entire 22-mile journey.

The list below is presented without ranking, but rather in the approximate order in which we talked about the works. I’m sure it will inspire some disagreements of your own. — M.H. Miller

Arlene Shechet: Can you go over what the question is again?

M.H. Miller: We’re trying to think about the most important works of sculpture since the end of World War II. The only constraint is that they have to be made post-1945.

Shechet: I feel like we need to define whether we’re choosing based on artists and their careers versus individual artworks.

Charles Gaines: There’s no way in the world I can think of an individual work, because I’m thinking about the body of work that person has done.

Adam Pendleton: In focusing on specific works, I think you naturally think about the rest of the artist's work. Great works don’t just drop out of the sky.

Ruba Katrib: I think a lot of the works that we’re going to bring up — the ones we think are really important — may not be known by, let’s say, a broader public anymore. I feel a lot of pressure.

Firelei Báez: So, are we considering a work’s global impact as the main justification for deeming it “important”?

Miller: I think “important” means important to you.

Báez: So it’s absolutely subjective? Oh, no!

Miller: Well, however you define “important” for yourself in this conversation is how you define it. I think we should just start with this first work that you picked, Arlene.

1. David Smith, “Hudson River Landscape,” 1951

Coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, the term “Abstract Expressionism” tends to conjure the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But those midcentury American painters had a counterpart in David Smith, who brought the movement into three dimensions with steel sculptures that were similarly gestural and introspective and without a central focal point. Smith was a skilled welder — he worked at the American Locomotive Company during World War II building tanks and tank destroyers — though he’d studied painting at New York City’s Art Students League in his youth. That training is evident in his midcareer work “Hudson River Landscape,” which portrays the sort of pastoral vista that had historically been the purview of painters. Measuring about six feet long and four feet high, with a depth of nearly 18 inches, the sculpture was based on the passing countryside Smith saw on the train journeys he made through upstate New York, where he and his first wife, the artist Dorothy Dehner, bought a farm in 1929. The lines of “Hudson River Landscape,” now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, form what can be interpreted as a constellation of steps, railroad tracks, clouds, streams and mountains. But the work rejects mass in favor of openness, with each length or squiggle of metal doubling as a boundary, and the work as a whole acting as a fragmentary frame for wherever it’s placed. — Rose Courteau

Shechet: When I came up in art history, David Smith was known as the father of American sculpture. I’ll speak up for him because he’s actually the result of World War II. He learned arc welding in order to contribute to the war effort. Before the war, aside from Julio Gonzalez’s work with Picasso, sculpture was all casts, and it was very figurative. David Smith opened sculpture up to the idea of drawing in space with metal.

2. Lygia Clark, “Bichos,” 1959-66

Most art isn’t meant to be touched, but Lygia Clark’s “Bichos” don’t really become art until they are in a viewer’s hands. Between 1959 and 1966, the Brazilian artist created these works — which range from the size of a miniature paper crane to that of a stove — out of square and curved aluminum panels connected by hinges. They look like geometric abstract paintings that went through a 3-D printer and sprang to life. Trained as a painter, Clark was a leading member of the Neo-Concrete movement, a group of Brazilian artists interested in how art could reconnect viewers to their bodies. (Later in life, she took her interest in interactivity even further, helping to develop practices in art therapy and psychoanalysis that are used to this day, especially in Brazil.) With these works, which are now in collections of museums around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Clark sought to share the magic of the creative act with her audience, to “offer ritual to the viewer,” as she said in 1960. Her “Bichos,” the name of which translates to “critters” in English, have no ideal configuration. As viewers manipulate the works, they can feel the cool metal beneath their fingers and hear the joints squeak and clack. — Julia Halperin

Báez: Lygia’s phenomenal.

Katrib: With “Bichos,” the sculpture can be morphed so there’s a sort of indeterminate element, but then it’s also participatory.

Shechet: I think she studied psychology. Touching an artwork, changing an artwork — there’s a certain connectivity about those pieces that I think was radical.

Báez: And the title is “Critters,” so it’s like this Rorschach test.

3. Kara Walker, “A Subtlety,” 2014

For nine weekends between spring and summer of 2014, people waited in line for hours for the chance to encounter a 75-foot-long, 35-foot-tall sugar-covered sphinx inside the former Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (The sculpture’s title is a reference to “subtleties,” elaborate sugar sculptures served at medieval banquets.) The gargantuan figure was the work of Kara Walker, an American artist then best known for paper silhouettes exploring the depravity of slavery.

Inside the football-field-size space, molasses dripped down walls and a thick, almost putrid smell hung in the air. Greeting visitors were 15 life-size sculptures of loincloth-clad boys, some made of brown sugar, others of resin coated in molasses, which melted over the show’s run. The sphinx’s head, adorned with a scarf, referenced the racist stereotype of the mammy, while her large breasts and exposed bottom evoked the overly sexualized jezebel. In a video for Creative Time, the public art organization that commissioned the project, the artist said that the work reflected on “a slave trade that traded sugar for bodies and bodies for sugar.” “A Subtlety” was the first large-scale sculpture Walker ever made and arguably the first artwork to go viral on Instagram. Following the show, most of the work was destroyed, with only the figure’s left hand remaining, but it lives on through thousands of lewd selfies visitors posted mock-pinching the sphinx’s nipples and pretending to lick her buttocks. For Walker, an artist informed by the history of Black women’s exploitation, that reception was part of the point: her work, she has said, responds to the “mucky and violent” nature of human behavior and “pulls it out of an audience.” — J.H.

Katrib: I feel like if we’re going to talk about a sculpture from the present, Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” is the work we should probably include, right?

Shechet: Yes, indeed.

Miller: I think “A Subtlety” is one of those things that we’ll be talking about 100 years from now. But Charles, you picked a different Kara Walker.

Charles Gaines: “Unmanned Drone” (2023) [for which the artist broke apart a monument to the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and rebuilt it as a kind of mythical creature]. It’s probably one of the most impactful sculptures I’ve ever seen.

Pendleton: I would prefer not to do “A Subtlety.”

Miller: What’s the argument against it?

Pendleton: Just on a historical and a personal level, if it’s going to be the one piece of art on this list that has a figurative bent to it — for me there are more interesting ways to represent Kara Walker.

Gaines: In “Unmanned Drone,” she’s doing things she hasn’t done before, and she’s embracing certain ideas of abstract form and political discourse. She’s reaching back into the past and showing us the future.

Shechet: I’m going to argue for “A Subtlety” because I feel like … New York is a community, and every once in a while, somebody makes a gesture that makes the community come together. And “A Subtlety” did that.

Miller: It’s true that people don’t usually line up to see a work of art.

Pendleton: But I don’t think it made people come together in a very sophisticated way.

Báez: I remember living two blocks from the Domino Sugar factory and getting in line, and my roommate’s mom had gone on disability because she went crazy working in that factory. And the fact that you could go in there, into this place with such a strong history, and people were posing under the breasts trying to catch the nipples. You saw the facile way people consumed this very heavy history.

Shechet: I think she reveals a lack of sophistication in us.

Pendleton: That’s what everyone always says about her work. I think that’s the most ridiculous argument.

Shechet: She’s doing something provocative. And by provoking, there’s going to be a mixed response. Some people will get it, some people won’t.

Pendleton: But is it provocative? What’s provocative about it? I want someone to tell me this.

Shechet: I think this work is uncomfortable. And some people don’t know how to be uncomfortable.

Pendleton: I think it’s simplistic, personally. Politically simplistic. Aesthetically simplistic. All the readings of it are all so blatantly obvious to me.

Shechet: I think it’s radical.

Gaines: It’s a radical spectacle. And I’d say an extraordinary spectacle.

Pendleton: I think it’s a continuum of expectations around representation when it comes to art made by Black people. That’s what I see.

4. Claes Oldenburg, “The Store,” 1961

The Swedish-born sculptor Claes Oldenburg rose to prominence at a moment of transition and experimentation in the New York art scene. As Abstract Expressionism was starting to feel stale and Andy Warhol’s shiny, optimistic brand of Pop Art had not yet fully emerged, Oldenburg introduced “The Store,” an early example of installation art and interactive sculpture. The artist transformed an 800-square-foot storefront on East Second Street into a functioning shop and a working studio. He even created stationery for the business, which he called Ray-Gun Manufacturing Company. Oldenburg spent his off-hours creating an inventory out of papier-mâché, wire and various fabrics. He laid out rumpled shirts and ties, hung oversize Pepsi-bottle caps on the wall and stocked pastry cases with slices of pie — all colored with commercially available paints. The artist’s lumpy, gloopy approximations of the wares on sale at neighboring bodegas and hardware stores collapsed not only the line between painting and sculpture but also that between consumer culture and high art. Unruly and caustic, they captured a darker side of what would come to be recognized as Pop Art while acknowledging art as a commodity and catering to the collecting elite coming from uptown. As Oldenburg put it in a 1985 interview, “Instead of paying a normal price for a loaf of bread, they would pay ninety-nine dollars for it.” — J.H.

Katrib: I was going to put “The Store,” which to me is more important.

Pendleton: That’s a great work, a great idea.

Shechet: I mean, I love “The Store.” I picked the “Lipstick” because it’s a very early Oldenburg. It’s an antiwar statement. He’s playing around with the idea of the military, poking fun at the men making vertical phallic monuments. I just think he gets so much done.

Báez: It’s the flaccid penis exemplified. It’s Americana around the world.

Gaines: “The Store” is a piece that could have been done yesterday.

Pendleton: So “The Store”?

Miller: I think “The Store” is arguably more influential in a lot of ways.

Shechet: It was a great breakthrough for downtown artists. … What’s next? Warhol?

Miller: I nominated the “Brillo Boxes” (1964). I was slightly surprised I was the only person who picked Warhol, but I’m happy to hear an argument against Warhol.

Shechet: Warhol’s not as strong as a sculptor. If this was a painting conversation, I would be like, “Of course Warhol.”

Pendleton: Can we talk about Mel Edwards’s “Lynch Fragments” instead?

5. Melvin Edwards, “Lynch Fragments,” 1963-2026

The blades of an open pair of scissors glisten menacingly atop a cluster of interlocking steel scraps, bound by a thick chain and mounted against the wall. One of about 300 small-scale welded steel reliefs in Melvin Edwards’s series “Lynch Fragments,” the stark creation confronts the viewer at eye level like a gnarled head or a nightmarish mask. Edwards, who died this year at age 88, a few weeks after T’s panel met, grew up Black in segregated Texas in the 1940s and ’50s. He was partly inspired by “100 Years of Lynchings,” the journalist Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 publication on racial violence in America. The year after it came out, Edwards, working in his Los Angeles studio, began welding together industrial and farming tools like railroad spikes, car parts, bolts, nails, gears, padlocks, rakes, hammers and ax heads into these dense, experimental sculptures. They reflected both the politically charged figuration of civil rights-era protest art and the language of formal abstraction without fully belonging to either school. Because they weren’t easy to classify, and because of the prejudice against and segregation of artists of color, their wider recognition was delayed until recently. Many of the works are now in the collections of museums across the country, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Met in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Edwards, who became the first Black sculptor to receive a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, continued to add to the series throughout his long career. In the 1970s, the works responded to Black Americans being disproportionately drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Later iterations reflected his increasing engagement with Africa and its anticolonial struggles. — Zoey Poll

Miller: This almost made my list.

Gaines: Yeah.

Katrib: Mine too.

Shechet: And mine, but why didn’t it?

Miller: I think it’s not widely known outside of people who are sculpture aficionados.

Pendleton: It’s a huge series, too, and I think there’s the serial nature of the works, which is why you ignore them.

Gaines: With respect to [Warhol’s] “Brillo Boxes,” I think that work got attention because it kept Marcel Duchamp’s question — “Why is it art?” — going. It’s part of this redefining of the work of art — by taking content out. And at the same time, formal artists like Mel Edwards were producing content-rich work. Content-rich work was not important at the time that Warhol was doing this, and I think that’s a part of the reason one gets more attention than the other.

Katrib: Mel Edwards is more influential now maybe than he was then. The “Lynch Fragments” have entered into the consciousness and people have caught up with them, finally.

6. Marisol, “Women and Dog,” 1963-64

For nearly 60 years, the Venezuelan American artist Marisol incorporated her own likeness into boxy wooden sculptures that combined Pop, pre-Columbian and folk art influences with a deadpan wit. Her inscrutable face — once described by Gloria Steinem as “not more open than a cat’s” — appears painted, sketched, carved in wood and cast in plaster across all sorts of tableaux of conventional life: She dines with herself (“Dinner Date,” 1963) and stands at the altar as both bride and groom (“The Wedding,” 1962-63). In what is perhaps her best-known work, “Women and Dog,” which is owned by the Whitney Museum, she appears, as if waiting for a “Walk” sign, alongside a couple of adult counterparts, one holding a perky canine by the leash, and a young girl. Years before the feminist art movement of the 1970s, these life-size figures offered a mordant if enigmatic portrait of bourgeois American womanhood. Rendered so stiffly they seem imprisoned in their own roughly hewn bodies, the women are at once fashionable, commanding and troublingly exposed, none more so than the central figure, which has a tiny photograph of Marisol on a wooden knob for a head. The child’s sketched-on face is contorted into the kind of subtle grimace that helped distinguish the artist’s work from the emotional flatness of Pop Art as practiced by artists like Warhol, who saw Marisol as a muse. — Z.P.

Katrib: I think there’s a tension between Art History 101 and the need to branch out a little bit. We can’t include everything. Maybe we need to have Marisol Escobar in here because it might be less expected and more exciting to see.

Pendleton: I’d be happy to have Marisol instead of Warhol, for sure.

Miller: What is the Marisol work?

Katrib: “Women and Dog.” It’s really amazing. To me, it covers this moment of women and Pop that was very important and global and idiosyncratic and underappreciated.

Shechet: Way underappreciated.

7. Noah Purifoy, “66 Signs of Neon,” 1966

In August 1965, the Alabama-born Noah Purifoy, the founding director of the Watts Towers Arts Center — a southern Los Angeles arts-education site near the monumental folk-art towers built by Simon Rodia — watched as fires broke out only four blocks away. The weeklong uprising in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts, a response to police violence, residential segregation and economic exclusion, consumed entire streets, leaving behind heaps of charred refuse. Afterward, Purifoy and his fellow artist Judson Powell pulled a wagon through the roads, picking up whatever caught their eye: liquefied neon signs, twisted pieces of steel, warped piano pedals, blackened photographs and a lot of burnt wood (which the artist Ed Ruscha said Purifoy used “as a painter might cadmium red”). The pair then transformed these scraps into assemblages with a Dadaist spirit. Purifoy saw the project as a tool for social change and soon invited other artists to make their own found-object works from his three-ton stockpile. The resulting series, “66 Signs of Neon,” comprised 66 pieces (as they were sold, new works were created to maintain this number), including Purifoy’s improvised suit of armor, “Sir Watts,” and his shattered-windshield sculpture, “Sudden Encounter.” A show of the works toured nationally, and many of them didn’t survive, but the artists, at least temporarily, managed to introduce the country to the ethos behind what Purifoy called “junk art,” which, he wrote, “illustrated […] the imposition of order on disorder, the creation of beauty from ugliness.” — Z.P.

Miller: What about Noah Purifoy?

Shechet: I love his work, but I think Betye Saar is a better choice.

Pendleton: I agree.

Katrib: I was going to put Betye Saar down, but then I was also just like, which is the piece?

Shechet: “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972).

Gaines: Their works are so different.

Katrib: Betye Saar’s work is obviously sculptural, but for me it somehow doesn’t fit. I also think Noah Purifoy dealing with refuse — it’s really loaded, intense material. Junk, but not just junk. It’s very specific junk. That transformative element of material is very apt today because that’s what so many people are doing.

8. Robert Rauschenberg, “Bed,” 1955

Coming up during the mid-1950s, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg was an aesthetic heir to Abstract Expressionism who also delighted in puncturing its solemn, often grandiose aura. After “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953), for which he spent weeks rubbing away a drawing he’d commissioned from Willem de Kooning, he created a similarly ambivalent and much-debated homage in the form of “Bed.” One of his earliest Combines — improvisatory assemblages that merged painting, sculpture and collage with mundane and eerie everyday objects — the work recast his own well-worn sheets and a folksy quilt from the artist Dorothea Rockburne as a pointedly intimate canvas. Rauschenberg defaced the bedding and pillow with feverish pencil scribblings and then stained them several times over with unruly, drippy blotches of oil paint in the style of Jackson Pollock. The gestures appeared so violent to some critics that one likened the work to “a police photo of the murder bed after the corpse has been removed.” Rauschenberg, however, didn’t find the work disturbing: Years after its creation, he told an interviewer, “My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.” Either way, “Bed,” now in MoMA’s collection, demonstrated that the boundaries between mediums — and between art and life — had become irrelevant amid the conceptual freedom offered by the postwar art world. — Z.P.

Pendleton: Then what about Rauschenberg? I mean, his sculptures are fantastic.

Katrib: I love his cardboard sculptures.

Shechet: I think Rauschenberg would be a huge omission.

Báez: If we have Rauschenberg, then we need to include Noah.

Pendleton: Why? Why do you say that?

Báez: Because he’s doing assemblage in a different way from Rauschenberg, and with a more generous social construct. I don’t know if we can have one without the other.

Miller: What’s the Rauschenberg?

Katrib: The Combine with the goat [“Monogram” 1955-59] is the most famous work, but I just can’t stand it.

Pendleton: But there are better ones.

Miller: I initially picked “Bed.”

Pendleton: “Bed” is great. Let’s do “Bed.”

Katrib: “Bed” is one of the first contemporary artworks I saw that made me want to get into the art world. I was a teenager, and it was on view at the Whitney, I believe. But I guess I also don’t count it fully a sculpture.

Miller: Painting playing the game of sculpture, right? That’s how Jasper Johns described the Combines.

Pendleton: That’s really nice.

9. Richard Serra, “Tilted Arc,” 1981

To roll, to crease, to twist, to knot, to split: These were among the 84 infinitives that a young Richard Serra gave himself as conceptual catalysts for his sculptures, which incorporated immense plates of steel more commonly seen in shipping containers. With these works, the American artist seemed capable of distorting space itself, in ways both subtle and seismic. After the federal General Services Administration commissioned Serra to erect “Tilted Arc” — a gently lilting 120-foot-long and 12-foot-tall curved steel wall that cleanly bisected Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan — office workers and residents protested what they viewed as an aggressive, unsightly obstacle to the flow of pedestrians. The length of oxidized rust-covered metal resembled a taut pen stroke when seen from above or from the side but loomed like an impassable border wall to those facing it. A hearing was convened, followed by a lawsuit about free speech and contract law that the artist eventually lost. The case changed the way in which public art was commissioned in America, helping to make community input standard practice and signaling the end of artistic autonomy in shared spaces, much to Serra’s chagrin. In March 1989, as “Tilted Arc” was about to be cut into pieces and hauled to a government parking lot in Brooklyn, Serra declared: “This government is savage. It is eating its culture.” — Z.P.

Miller: Now we’re at Serra. I think we have to pick a Serra.

Shechet: “Tilted Arc.”

Pendleton: I would choose something a little less well known, but I don’t know that that matters.

Miller: I think the whole story of “Tilted Arc” is interesting — how people reacted so violently to that work.

Pendleton: “Tilted Arc.” Done.

Shechet: A miracle. We agreed. That was fast. We’ve already talked about how sculpture has overlapped with painting. This is where sculpture overlaps with architecture.

Báez: I just see the history book that I was taught in school.

10. “Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam” at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 1968

The New York artists associated with minimalism — which traded the emotional heft of Abstract Expressionism for an interest in form, material, proportion and objectivity — may not seem, in retrospect, like obvious contenders to participate in one of the seminal exhibitions of the 1968 antiwar movement. The benefit at Paula Cooper was not only the gallery’s first show, but the first in SoHo, the neighborhood that would become, until the end of the 20th century, the center of the New York art world. The gallery placed work by the likes of Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin in conversation not just with one another, but with the world at large as student protesters from Brazil to Japan rebelled against violence and authoritarianism. Each of these artists would go on to transform sculpture: Judd through his explorations of static objects and their impact on empty space, Flavin through his treatment of color and light as tactile materials and LeWitt through his radical notion that an idea for a work was more significant than the resulting object. (The benefit show featured the first of LeWitt’s wall drawings, which consisted of instructions that someone else would follow to execute the piece.) “A work needs only to be interesting,” Judd wrote in his 1964 essay “Specific Objects,” outlining a stance that at first glance seems determinedly apolitical. But he also insisted, in a 1968 essay, that “the United States is still a hierarchical country […] my work and that of most artists is opposed to that hierarchy.” Art, the Paula Cooper benefit suggested, did not have to be explicitly political to engage with politics; artists, after all, are citizens, too. — Michael Snyder

Miller: I was surprised I was the only person who picked Judd.

Báez: Because again, it’s the same history book underlined.

Shechet: He’s had a lot of influence.

Báez: We’re in this really tender moment in history where everything is falling, literally. We can either amplify the things that led us to where we are, or we can find moments that made escape routes outside of that.

Pendleton: That’s a really good point. But I think there’s enough room on the list to probably include a Judd and find these escape routes.

Miller: Someone make an argument for Sol LeWitt over Judd.

Pendleton: There’s a kind of generosity to LeWitt’s work that I think is often absent from sculptural practice — that lightness and fluidity; there’s a magic to it that’s important.

Shechet: I just feel we’re going down the wrong road with him if we put his sculptures on, because it’s not what he did best.

Pendleton: I don’t agree with that.

Gaines: I don’t either but … we’re just going to have to disagree.

Pendleton: I feel like if we’re not going to have Judd, we have to have LeWitt.

Miller: I don’t think we can just ignore minimalist sculpture entirely. We would look like we don’t really know what we’re talking about.

Shechet: Dan Flavin didn’t even make it onto our lists.

Katrib: He should have.

Pendleton: I think LeWitt had more interesting questions around art in general. … I think Donald Judd’s a great sculptor, but I think LeWitt pushed it a little further than Judd.

Shechet: You’re pushing it!

Pendleton: Judd doesn’t come close intellectually to LeWitt.

Miller: Are LeWitt’s wall drawings sculpture?

Gaines: Well, I don’t know. It’s hard. Sol had a wide practice, but I don’t know how you cannot think of LeWitt as a sculptor. … His whole approach was to make a unified relationship between a paradox — between an object and an idea, merging them into one thing. That still has impact on the way we’re thinking right now.

Miller: I have in my head at all times the comment section of The New York Times. And what we’re going to get is people who are like, “Where is Flavin?” “Where is Judd?” But I think just because it’s expected doesn’t mean we have to do it.

Katrib: Maybe Judd and LeWitt and Flavin just become one entry.

Miller: I mean, they were all in the first Paula Cooper show in ’68.

Katrib: Wait, why don’t we do that? Can we put the show in?

Pendleton: Let’s just do that.

11. Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty,” 1970

Three years before his death in a plane crash in 1973, the American Robert Smithson flew west from New York City to Utah to scout a location for a new work in the northern branch of the Great Salt Lake. He found a remote site called Rozel Point, where, working with local contractors, he transformed 6,650 tons of organic material — mostly mud and basalt from extinct volcanoes — into a 15-foot-wide spiral extending 1,500 feet into the lake. “Spiral Jetty” would soon become the emblematic work of the land art movement that had sprung up a few years before when artists like Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt, Smithson’s wife and collaborator, urged art out of the gallery and into the open air. Land art led to new explorations in site specificity that defied the all-consuming logic of the art market. But “Spiral Jetty” is also, despite its immovable mass, a work about entropy and environmental degradation. Surrounded by the debris of abandoned oil rigs, it’s been subjected for half a century to the corrosive waters of the Great Salt Lake, which rise and fall to submerge or expose the work, depositing crystals over its surface even as the sculpture itself erodes. “The Jetty,” as philosopher Gary Shapiro wrote in a 2019 essay, “suggests and anticipates its own ruin.” Today, Smithson’s meditation on impermanence has come to read as a parable and a measuring stick for ecological catastrophe. It has only grown more relevant with time. — M.S.

Báez: Why would we not include “Spiral Jetty?”

Pendleton: What about someone like Nancy Holt?

Shechet: Nancy Holt was amazing but wasn’t able to be influential because her work didn’t get shown.

Pendleton: There are a lot of great artists who by virtue of when their work was shown did not, frankly, end up reaching their full potential, because they were ignored.

Shechet: Yes, like women and people of color.

Pendleton: It’s very hard to develop a body of work when you’re ignored critically, ignored commercially, ignored culturally. Richard Serra can become Richard Serra because people are pouring resources of every kind into him.

Shechet: With “Spiral Jetty,” when whole groups of people visit a place and marvel at something, that’s an incredible thing

Gaines: Most interesting of all the earth arts, the “Spiral Jetty.”

12. Eva Hesse, “Contingent,” 1969

By the time Eva Hesse entered her brief, shining five-year period of productivity in 1965, sculpture in New York, where the German-born artist lived and worked, had turned decisively toward industrial materials and hard geometries. Hesse was one of several artists associated with what Robert Morris, a significant sculptor in his own right, called “anti-form” in a 1968 essay in Artforum. Anti-form, Morris argued, focuses on malleable, unstable materials like string, fiberglass and fabric: “Considerations of gravity become as important as those of space,” he writes. “Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied.” For one of her final works before her death in 1970 at age 34 from a brain tumor, “Contingent,” Hesse painted latex over eight swaths of cheesecloth, then dipped the ends in fiberglass. Both delicate and violent, they resemble soiled, threadbare sheets put out to dry or, perhaps, flayed skin. “Contingent” was, as its title suggests, an exploration of precarity and accident. In this and other works, Hesse investigated not the (supposedly) ageless rules of form and proportion — signal preoccupations for her minimalist contemporaries — but rather the mercurial experience of living in an uncooperative human body. Hesse never identified directly with the second-wave feminist movement and in fact bristled at her own categorization as a “woman artist,” but her sculpture, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, has become part of the feminist art canon. — M.S.

Miller: What do we think of Eva Hesse?

Katrib: I think Eva Hesse is important.

Shechet: So important.

13. Gordon Matta-Clark, “Splitting,” 1974

The 1970s were a time of profound disillusionment in America, from the ravages of the Vietnam War to the machinations of Richard Nixon. City centers burned even as the mask of suburban utopia began to slip. With “Splitting,” Gordon Matta-Clark condensed an entire era’s anger and paranoia into a single, brazen gesture: Taking a condemned house in New Jersey, owned by the collector and future gallerist Holly Solomon and her husband, Horace, the artist cut it in half with a reciprocating saw and other tools. The house’s two sides immediately pulled apart, opening a void in what had recently been a solid (or solid-seeming) volume. Photo and video documentation conserved the work for posterity, though it existed in physical form for only three months. The same year he produced “Splitting” — and six years after he earned his undergraduate degree in architecture — Matta-Clark participated, along with peers, including Laurie Anderson and Tina Girouard, in a group show called “Anarchitecture” at the alternative exhibition space 112 Greene Street in Lower Manhattan. The exhibition’s sly title, which Matta-Clark coined but never neatly defined, soon became inseparable from his work. If architecture strives toward permanence and suburban life toward prosperity, then “Anarchitecture,” and “Splitting” in particular, exposed the hollow core of those aspirations. Architectural space was Matta-Clark’s raw material. No artist before or since has used it with such clarity and force. — M.S.

Miller: A few people nominated Gordon Matta-Clark.

Báez: Can you go into your history books and tell me why? Give me a love note to Gordon.

Katrib: His major moves are sculpture through removal, shaping the environment outside of just the studio. And they’re also very temporary, of course.

Gaines: He’s bringing certain modernist aesthetic forces to ordinary things, having them act on ordinary things.

Katrib: It’s also taking you into the city versus land art, which takes you out into nature.

14. Louise Bourgeois, “The Destruction of the Father,” 1974

Born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911, Louise Bourgeois was named after her father, Louis, a serial philanderer who ran sales for the family’s tapestry restoration business; six decades later, in 1974, she dedicated one of the pivotal works in her sprawling, impossibly diverse practice to his symbolic undoing. In “The Destruction of the Father,” Bourgeois, a devotee of psychoanalysis, created an immersive, life-size grotto, its ceiling and floor studded with latex-covered bulges suggestive of rows of teeth. In the center, she piled mounds of lamb shoulders and chicken legs, cast in plaster and covered in latex, on an altar-like table: a violent fantasy of patricidal cannibalism lit in carnal red. Visceral and direct, the work, part of the collection of the private museum of Glenstone in Potomac, Md., exchanged high-minded abstraction and platonic meditations on form for the psychological clarity of autobiography, setting the stage for the confessional register and large-scale installations of successors like Tracey Emin and Mike Kelley. Sex, orgasm, domesticity, death, fecundity and pain are among the fundamental subjects of Bourgeois’s work, where they’re transmogrified into monumental statuary, eerie installations, delicate watercolors that seem to be drawn in menstrual blood and tender late-career sculptures stitched from fabric. Though Bourgeois wouldn’t gain widespread recognition until the age of 70, after her much-lauded 1982 retrospective at MoMA in New York, by the time of her death, in 2010 at 98, she loomed large over the history of 20th-century art. — M.S.

Báez: Let’s do Louise Bourgeois.

Miller: My vote would be for “Maman” (1999). The spider.

Shechet: Oh my God, not at all! I think “Maman” is just too well known and very commercial.

Katrib: What about “Destruction of the Father,” though?

Shechet: Yes. “Destruction of the Father” I love.

15. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83”

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Marie Denat, who went by their first names professionally, shared a birthday and a lifelong passion for making sweeping, site-responsive works. A few years after marrying, the couple, who were based in New York from 1964 onward, began collaborating on temporary outdoor installations like a barricade of empty oil drums across one of Paris’ narrowest streets, in protest of the Berlin Wall. These avant-garde sculptures presaged the land art of the late 1960s, though they’d be dwarfed in scale by the duo’s later projects, including “Surrounded Islands,” for which they encircled 11 uninhabited islands off Miami with bubble gum pink polypropylene fabric. Extending 200 feet off each island’s coast, the material floated on the surface of Biscayne Bay, producing a spectacle observable from the city’s shores and skies and compelling viewers to consider and perhaps care for their environment anew. Begun in 1980, “Surrounded Islands” took three years to complete and involved the removal of 40 tons of garbage from the islands and a work force of more than 400. (The project’s 6.5 million square feet of fabric were eventually recycled.) In a 2018 interview, Christo attributed the undertaking’s “enormous energy” to the “absolute reality” of its elements: “real water, real wind, real calm, real miles, real things.” — R.C.

Miller: Several people nominated Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Shechet: I picked “Wrapped Reichstag” [a 1995 work that saw the couple wrap the legislative government building in Berlin in aluminum-coated propylene], a gigantic gesture incorporating architecture and civic engagement.

Miller: I feel like “Surrounded Islands” is more iconic.

Báez: Same.

16. David Hammons, “African-American Flag,” 1990

Since the 1960s, David Hammons has made art using everything from margarine to human hair to condoms to discarded lumber, but among his work’s most recurrent elements is the American flag. In “America the Beautiful” (1968), a lithograph of the flag cloaks a life-size print of the artist’s body, evoking the coffins of American soldiers slain in Vietnam. “Black First, America Second” and “Injustice Case,” both from 1970, likewise made ironic use of the flag to gesture toward the duality of Black American identity created by racist double standards. But with “African-American Flag,” Hammons moved beyond repurposing the symbol to reimagining it. Maintaining its stars-and-stripes design, the artist replaced its classic red, white and blue color scheme with that of the Pan-African flag, designed in 1920 by the African nationalist Marcus Garvey and adopted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association. This printed cotton revision has a layered complexity, asserting Black Americans’ claim to the country and the rights it promises its citizens. First produced as an edition of five, “African American Flag” debuted in Amsterdam in 1990, a year after America’s Supreme Court ruled that flag desecration was protected by the First Amendment as free speech. Different iterations of the work have since appeared in numerous settings, including at the entrance to the Studio Museum in Harlem and at MoMA PS1 in Queens. — R.C.

Gaines: He made this at a time when there was this investigation of the aesthetics of ordinary things, and he introduced into that aesthetic language the politics of culture. David was among the first artists who paid a lot of attention to the social and cultural references of found objects.

Shechet: And what I like about the flag is there are many versions of it.

Báez: It’s a soft and a strong gesture all at once.

17. Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai)”

Through the late 1960s and 1970s, the German artist Joseph Beuys developed the idea of “social sculpture” to describe engaging ordinary people in collective creative processes with the intention of shaping society as a work of art. Some 20 years later, Rirkrit Tiravanija helped push the concept into the century’s final chapter with “Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai),” which he staged at New York’s Paula Allen Gallery. (It’s been restaged several times since then, including at MoMA PS1 in 2023.) The son of a Thai diplomat (and the grandson of a

SAM Residencies welcomes applications from artists, curators, educators, researchers, and creative practitioners from across the globe to apply for Cycle 4.

Slated to run from June 2027 to December 2028, Cycle 4 is organised around three strands: Listening/Attuning, Making/Material Cultures and Beyond Human/Interdependence.

Listening/Attuning platforms practices that respond critically to the urgencies of our time. Making/Material Cultures foregrounds material inquiry and the process of making. Beyond Human/Interdependence addresses relationships between humans, technologies, ecologies, and other forms of life, considering how these worlds remain fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Applicants are invited to interpret these themes in relation to their practice.

Applications for the Artist, Community & Education, and Curatorial & Research residencies will be open from 1 August 2026 to 30 September 2026, 11:59PM (GMT+8).

Artist Residency: Open to artists and collectives pursuing new artistic research, experimentation and modes of making. Community & Education Residency: Open to practitioners working at the intersection of artistic practice, education, and community engagement.

Curatorial & Research residency: Open to curators and researchers working towards new approaches to exhibition making, and curatorial practice and research methodologies.

SAM Residencies is open to individuals, duos and collectives from all mediums and disciplines. Selected applicants will undertake residencies between June 2027 and December 2028. International applicants may apply for residencies of one to three months, while Singapore-based applicants may apply for up to six months. Applications will be assessed by an international panel comprising respected voices in contemporary art and practice.

Residents will pursue independent research and are open to engage with communities and the public in Singapore as part of their process. They are also encouraged to share works in progress or research outcomes through open studios, screenings, workshops, talks, and other experimental public formats.

Open Call Requirements:

Applicants will be required to submit the following:

1. Curriculum Vitae (CV) / Resume
2. Portfolio
3. Statement of Interest (500 - 1000 words) - Applicants are invited to interpret Cycle 4's thematic strands in relation to their practice. 
4. Recommendation Letter - Applicants will require a recommendation as a character reference. This can be submitted directly on this portal by the recommender themselves.

Application Deadline: 30 September 2026, 11:59PM (GMT+8).

Further information and requirements for supporting documents are detailed within the portal. To apply, please access our application portal at the link below.

Click here to apply.

THE FULL OPEN CALL:

Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte and UNIDEE Residency Programs, in collaboration with UniCredit Group, announce the third edition of the open call “Ecosystems as Living Communities”, supporting two production residencies for emerging international artists working with socially engaged artistic practices that address contemporary ecological issues.

The two selected artists, one Italian and one international artist residing in Europe, will take part in a residency dedicated to the creation and production of new artworks, which will become part of the UniCredit Art Collection.

OBJECTIVES AND THEME

In 2026, UniCredit Group renews its collaboration with Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte and UNIDEE Residency Programs, launching the third edition of the project dedicated to supporting artistic research and production in response to contemporary ecological challenges. Building on the success of the previous editions, the initiative continues to promote interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific, technological, and humanistic fields, contributing actively to society’s sustainable transformation.

In continuity with the mission of Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, the vision and work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the project reaffirms its commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. It encourages emerging artists to take on a pivotal role in the process of social and ecological transformation, engaging with the urgent challenges posed by climate change and the environmental and social crisis.

The third edition, continuing under the theme “Ecosystems as Living Communities”, invites artists to further explore global, contemporary, and future ecological challenges, fostering positive and regenerative visions of desirable futures. Artists are encouraged to propose projects that investigate ecosystems as interconnected communities of humans and non-humans, challenging anthropocentric perspectives and promoting an ecocentric mindset.

Envisioned as platforms for collaborative and cross-disciplinary inquiry, the residencies will foster dialogue between selected artists and experts from diverse fields, leading to the creation of new artworks that will become part of the UniCredit Art Collection.

The call welcomes artistic research exploring ecological transformation in its many forms. Proposed projects and artworks may investigate different dimensions of contemporary environmental transitions, including the role of water and other natural elements within ecological, social, and technological systems, alongside other themes related to sustainability, resilience, and ecosystem regeneration.

Artistic projects and artworks may engage with one or more of the following areas:

• Technological approaches to ecological transformation, investigating how digital tools, scientific research, and emerging technologies can reveal new perspectives on environmental systems and support more sustainable futures;

• Community engagement and environmental awareness, exploring educational, participatory, and community-based initiatives that foster collective reflection and action around contemporary ecological challenges;

• Circular and regenerative ecologies, exploring practices of reuse, repair, recycling, and responsible resource management across production systems—including fashion, food, manufacturing, and other industries—to foster more sustainable and resilient ways of producing and living;

• Water, natural elements, ecosystems, and sustainable futures, investigating the role of water and other natural elements, such as air, soil, minerals, and biodiversity, in shaping ecological systems, community resilience, and sustainable futures. Projects may address their environmental, social, cultural, and technological significance in the context of contemporary and future challenges.

THE RESIDENCY AND PRODUCTION

The production residencies, known as UNIDEE Connective Residencies, aim to strengthen the dialogue between artistic research and other sectors of society. They foster a multidisciplinary and dynamic approach to building meaningful networks that connect artists with researchers, associations, industries, organisations, and members of civil society.

The residencies will take place between December 2026 and April 2027.

Two selected artists will engage in a shared research phase, including meetings with tutors, researchers, and experts, as well as field visits. The residency structure and schedule will be tailored to each project and defined collaboratively with the artists.

A collaborative attitude and flexibility in developing and implementing the projects—consistent with the evolving research process—are therefore essential.

The resulting works will be publicly presented at Cittadellarte in Biella and will become part of the UniCredit Art Collection. Moreover, the outcomes of the residencies will be disseminated online, contributing to broader public awareness and promoting responsible engagement with ecological and social transformation.

RESIDENCY TIME FRAME

• December 2026: Residency preparation phase at Cittadellarte (4 – 5 days, December 14–18, 2026).

• January – February 2027: Research and pre-production phase of the residency at Cittadellarte (including possible research visits) - schedule adapted to each project and agreed upon with the artists (3 weeks expected, between January 11–February 13, 2026).

• February – March 2027: Production phase at Cittadellarte - schedule adapted to each project and agreed upon with the artists (3 weeks expected, between February 15–March 27, 2026).

• April 2027: Exhibition preparation and public presentation of the artworks at Cittadellarte (2 weeks expected, dates TBC based on the official date of the event “Arte al Centro”).

ARTWORK GUIDELINES

The final artwork should be an original work developed within the framework of the residency and in dialogue with its main theme. Upon completion, the artwork will become part of the UniCredit Art Collection.

There are no restrictions on artistic language or medium. The artwork must be unique and produced as a single, non-editioned work.

The work should be suitable for long-term conservation; artists using ephemeral, living, or technically complex materials are required to provide detailed installation, maintenance, and conservation instructions.

For technically complex or large-scale installations, artists are also required to develop a simplified version of the work that can be installed in smaller exhibition spaces while preserving its conceptual integrity.

WHAT WE PROVIDE

• A gross artist fee of €6,500, payable in accordance with applicable local and international regulations.
• A production budget of up to €2,500 to cover all costs directly related to the production of the final artwork, including installation supports, equipment rental, materials, and other necessary production expenses.
• Round-trip travel and research trips, with a combined budget of up to €1,000-1,500 per artist (depending on travel distance).
• Accommodation in a single room with shared facilities at Cittadellarte, along with a per diem of €25 per day (for up to 60 days) to cover meals and daily expenses.
• A research budget of up to €500 to cover fees for experts whose contribution supports the development of the artist's research during the residency.

Cittadellarte will separately cover technical support for the exhibition installation, the communication of the project and the production of a publication accompanying the residency and the final exhibition.

The final artwork produced during the residency will become part of the UniCredit Art Collection.

APPLICATION AND SELECTION

ELIGIBILITY

• The production residencies are open to emerging and mid-career artists, designers, architects, fashion designers, musicians, filmmakers, and other cultural practitioners whose creative practices engage with contemporary ecological issues.
• Applications are welcome from practitioners working across all disciplines, media, and methodologies, provided they can demonstrate previous experience in the production of artistic works. Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and experimental approaches are encouraged.
• Two artists will be selected: one Italian artist and one international artist residing in Europe (EU Member States; EFTA/EEA countries – Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland; the United Kingdom; and EU candidate countries).
• Fluency in English is preferred, as it will be the main working language of the residency. However, it is not a mandatory requirement, and applications from candidates with a sufficient level of English to participate in the programme are also welcome. Knowledge of the Italian language is not required, but it is appreciated.
• Candidates must be available to participate within the timeframes specified in this open call.

APPLICATION PROCESS

To apply for selection, please complete the online form: https://form.jotform.com/261934178865370 and submit the following documents, all in English:

1. Project Proposal (one PDF, up to 5 MB) The PDF should include:

• Your project proposal, outlining how it relates to the main theme, which of the three research areas it addresses, and how it contributes to them (max. 2000 characters)
• Which forms of interdisciplinarity do you plan to activate and which kinds of expertise would you like to collaborate with? (max. 1000 characters)
• What medium will you use, and what form will your final artwork take? Please refer to the artwork guidelines (max. 1000 characters)
• Please also include a preliminary timeline (based on the residency timeframe) and an indicative budget for the proposed project. Both will be further refined together during the residency.

2. Portfolio and CV (one PDF, up to 5 MB) The PDF should include:

• A selected portfolio with max. 5 projects/artworks most fitting to the topic of this call;
• A brief biography and CV.

The deadline for submissions is ** Sunday, September 6, 2026** at 11:59 PM.

If necessary, shortlisted candidates will be invited to attend an online interview between late September and mid-October 2026. The successful candidates will be selected by mid-October 2026.

JURY

Applications will be evaluated by a jury composed of the Advisory Board of UNIDEE Residency Programs (Andy Abbott, Beatrice Catanzaro, Juan Sandoval, Alessandra Saviotti and Angela Serino) and in dialogue with Paolo Naldini, Director of Cittadellarte.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

The jury will evaluate the applications based on the following criteria:

• Relevance to the thematic framework. The proposal should clearly engage with one or more of the three research areas: technological approaches to water systems, community engagement and water awareness, or circular and regenerative productive ecologies.
• Artistic quality and originality. Evaluation will consider the conceptual strength, originality, aesthetic quality, and coherence of the proposal, as well as the clarity and distinctiveness of the artistic language as presented in the portfolio and previous projects.
• Research and methodological approach. Proposals should demonstrate a strong research foundation and a clear methodological approach, integrating artistic practice with scientific, technological, social, or ecological perspectives where relevant.
• Interdisciplinarity and collaboration potential. Particular attention will be given to the capacity of the project to foster interdisciplinary approaches and cross-sector collaborations between artistic, scientific, and community-based practices.
• Feasibility and clarity of the final artwork. The project should be feasible within the residency framework, with a clear articulation of process, timeline, and expected final output, including awareness of presentation and documentation requirements..

QUESTIONS?

For any further information, do not hesitate to write to unidee@cittadellarte.it

A video showing the trail up to the main peak of Mount Jade—the tallest mountain in Taiwan—and back, with narration on its history, ecology and climate.

A quick trip to Kyoto during cherry blossom season, in April 2026.

FULL ARTICLE

By Travis Diehl

This spring, Charles Ross sat in his studio in SoHo, but his mind was elsewhere: a mesa in eastern New Mexico, where his life’s work, a monumental naked-eye earthwork called “Star Axis,” — part observatory and part pyramid — juts at the cosmos. “If you’re there in the winter when there’s a snowstorm, it’s like the sky is painting the earth white,” he said. “And the thunderstorms. And rainbows several times a week.”

Ross has a degree in math and a yen for physics. He says he can sense celestial alignments, and feel the difference between colors of light in a spectrum. When he needed a well dug for his desert home, he called a dowser.

The artist, 88, belongs to a generation of land artists who shed galleries and cities to work at a scale more common in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. In 1975, he had been crisscrossing the Southwest for four years, hunting for the perfect location for “Star Axis,” when a cowboy appeared and handed him a business card.

Ross in the entrance to the Star Tunnel stairs at “Star Axis,” his land art project near Anton Chico, N.M. At the top is the viewing window.

The cowboy’s father, W.O. Culbertson Jr., happened to own the surrounding 62,000 acres. Ross called him up and explained his plans for a sculpture that would help people sense the deep past and distant future, by visualizing the changing position of Earth’s current north star, Polaris. He wanted to see the night sky as Cleopatra might have seen it.

Ross imagined visitors observing Polaris through a metal ring at the top of a long staircase, aligned to the Earth’s celestial axis. “I said, ‘I need about a square mile.’ And I’ll never forget the answer. He said, ‘Well, hell, we’ve got plenty of those.’” The rancher deeded Ross about 400 acres. In exchange, Ross built a bridge over a culvert to help Culbertson’s limo reach his hacienda.

Ross broke ground during the U.S. Bicentennial year. Fifty years and more than $10 million later, he says “Star Axis” will be done by winter. In the final design, the staircase rises 11 stories through a tunnel blasted in the rock of Chupinas Mesa, 6,000 feet above sea level and into a viewing chamber in a concrete, stone and steel pyramid 52 feet tall. A circular window there frames Polaris. As viewers climb each of the 147 stairs, the rim of the window appears to broaden, giving an idea of how far Polaris has and will move in a given amount of time, during the 26,000-year cycle known as precession, the gravitational wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis.

The view from the Hour Chamber in the pyramid of “Star Axis.” It takes one hour for a star to move from one edge of the doorway to the other.

“Star Axis” is a visitor from another time. The sculpture speaks a new-age language of earth and sky; in cosmic terms, the project’s 50-year story is negligible, yet it’s rooted in a moment that produced contemporary artists with epochal aspirations. “The monumentality and the scale of ambition are part of what takes your breath away with the work,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said in an interview. A short film on “Star Axis” is included in a series on artists that the National Gallery produced for America250.

“Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Charles Ross, Robert Smithson: These are the high priests of Land art,” Virginia Dwan, the 3M heiress and New York gallerist who nurtured them, wrote in the 2012 catalog for “Ends of the Earth,” a definitive land art survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Almost all the rest of Ross’s cohort has completed their remote masterworks: Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” 1970, in Utah’s Great Salt Lake; De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” 1977, in New Mexico. The most recent, Heizer’s “City,” in Nevada, opened to the public in 2022 after 50 years. Only James Turrell’s “Roden Crater,” a bigger, slicker observatory, remains unfinished — although Turrell, a slightly younger, West Coast artist, is part of the adjacent but distinct “light and space” movement.

An antechamber at the base of the staircase frames views of constellations to the south, while the staircase climbs north. Ross designed features like this with full-scale mockups. This pyramid portion of the structure rises 52 feet above the mesa.

Ross has declared “Star Axis” nearly complete in the past. A 2002 article in The New York Times put its projected opening date at 2006. This time, he said, is different. The structure is done. Ross and his team will spend the summer cleaning up the grounds and finishing the drainage system that protects “Star Axis” from New Mexico’s monsoons. Ross said the pyramid is so solid that it could slide off the mountain in one piece.

The challenge is ensuring that “Star Axis” endures in the public mind. Ross showed me a long-exposure photograph of “Star Axis” he took in 2000, with stars tracing short arcs through the turquoise night. “You couldn’t do that picture now,” he said, “without retouching out all the satellites.”

Ross at the tunnel entrance to “Star Axis,” called the Avenue, with 147 steps, all pointed at Polaris. Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says works of land art like “Star Axis” are “specks in the scale of the landscape. They’re not monuments to anything except the fragility of our own perception and experience.”

It’s Not About Him

The day before the summer solstice (June 21, roughly 1 p.m.), Jamie Clements picked me up from the Albuquerque airport. A silver-haired, loquacious Texan, he cut his teeth in the fund-raising world in the 1980s writing nonpartisan solicitations for Karl Rove’s direct marketing company; from 2013 to 2025 he headed the foundation that supports New Mexico’s state museums. He has taken dozens of prospective benefactors to the mesa over the years. In 2026, Ross and his wife, the artist Jill O’Bryan, hired him as chief executive of their nonprofit, the Land Light Foundation.

“Star Axis” was underwritten by Ross’s art sales, and patrons like Dwan. Today, donors can pay a thousand dollars or more to visit with a small group, or sponsor a stair for six figures. Clements told me that it’s tougher fund-raising for the sculpture’s upkeep and staffing than for more typical arts organizations. I joked that maybe that’s because there’s no wall to put donors’ names on. He pointed out that Ross’s name isn’t on the walls either.

Despite the scale of Ross’s project and his centrality to the land art movement, he remains a cult figure. In a world of swaggering personalities, he is relatively humble. The rapper Kanye West filmed an IMAX movie at “Roden Crater.” No such celebrities at “Star Axis.”

A model of “Star Axis” in Ross’s studio in New Mexico shows a cone-shaped excavation blasted out of the Chupinas Mesa, and a staircase that progresses from underground through the pyramid to a viewing chamber.

But Ross isn’t unknown. His drawings and prism sculptures are at the Smithsonian. He has built more than 20 permanent prism installations called Solar Spectrums, which spread the sun into rainbows at different times of day and year, at sites from Tasmania to Tokyo, including a private home for the Walmart heiress Alice Walton and a chapel at the Harvard Business School. “Spectrum 14,” commissioned for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time survey in 2024, exploring connections between art and science, is installed in the museum through Nov. 29.

Yet in the time it has taken to finish “Star Axis,” many of the wells that supported early land art have dried up. Dwan, the patron, died in 2022; a spokesperson for the Dia Art Foundation, which runs “The Lightning Field,” “Spiral Jetty” and Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” (1973-1976), said the institution has “no plans to add to our constellation of sites at this time.” Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and director of Dia between 1994 and 2006, told me that he helped Heizer form a consortium of institutional backers for his sculpture, “City,” under the nonprofit Triple Aught Foundation.

Heizer and Ross were once studio neighbors, and are still close. While “Star Axis” is smaller and less remote than “City,” the comparison is unavoidable. O’Bryan, Ross’s wife, pointed out that Heizer shows at Gagosian gallery, while “Charles doesn’t have a blue chip,” she said. “He’s with Franklin Parrasch.”

O’Bryan met Ross in 1994 when she became his studio assistant, while completing her Ph.D. in art theory. She splits her time between “Star Axis” and her own art, which includes rubbings of the mesa and intricate conceptual drawings where one hash mark corresponds to one breath. The couple, with their rescue dogs Pi and Tika, spend summers in a New Mexico house made of double-wide trailers with generous studio space. Once it gets too cold to pour concrete, they return to Manhattan.

Like many in Ross’s orbit, O’Bryan seems impressed by her husband’s balance of gentleness and drive. “That was the thing that attracted me to Charles’s particular type of genius,” O’Bryan said, “which is that it’s not about him.”

Govan pushed back on the idea that land art requires plentiful ego. With the typical monument, he said, powerful people “caused workers to build things in honor of gods, heroes, battles won and the usual.” Works of land art like “Star Axis” are “specks in the scale of the landscape. They’re not monuments to anything except the fragility of our own perception and experience.”

On its small scale, getting “Star Axis” visitor ready is a race against entropy. The Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in Denver built an environmentally friendly concept house for the project in 2014 that holds up to six guests a night. Decks, solar panels and motorized windows have all needed repair.

In 2025, two New Mexico lawmakers introduced a bill that would have funded a feasibility study for the state’s acquisition of “Star Axis.” State Senator Pat Woods, one of HB 37’s sponsors, wrote in an email that safety was an issue. He pointed out that a “higher than normal” staircase was meant to be traversed in the dark. “We explained to the committee chair that there was liability but it was a truly unique sight.” The committee chair declined to hear the bill.

Construction Stories

The remnants of construction line the road up the mesa. There’s a shipping container used as a tool shed, with a small cement mixer outside; farther up is a squat yellow bulldozer with plants sprouting from the dirt in its scoop.

Ross assured me the bulldozer was in perfect working condition. It’s military surplus, built for an invasion. A Caterpillar dealer in town sold it to him for its scrap value, he said, because it was so ugly.

One reason “Star Axis” took so long is that Ross designed it himself. He has had help, of course — including on the finer points of engineering and astronomy — and he’s made drawings, but the details seem to live in his head. He doesn’t need permits, O’Bryan told me, because “Star Axis” is technically a sculpture, not a building.

Every summer for 50 years, Ross has journeyed to New Mexico, hired local laborers and gotten to work. The first task was to dynamite a cone and tunnel from the mesa. Boulders flew into the pasture, Ross said, and when the dust cleared, he found the dynamite schematic had come to rest on top of one, with a small stone keeping it in place. “I thought, I’ve got to say yes to that.” He collaged the schematic into a drawing.

Ross showed me up a narrow spiral staircase in the Hour Chamber in the fore of the pyramid. X’s on the wall marked where a railing will go. From inside, it takes a star one hour to cross the triangular doorway. The walls here are as thick as 12 feet.

The stone slabs — mostly pink granite donated by a Texas company — are lifted into place with a crane. The middle is filled in with rocks and concrete. Thick steel rods run every three feet.

Ross got lucky: The remote site is barely within range of the nearest concrete batch plant. Any farther and the concrete would harden before it arrived. Ross estimates “Star Axis” contains around 120 trucks’ worth.

“When we were working on the walls up around the big excavation,” Ross said, “guys were on scaffolds about 10 feet below the top working on the stonework. There’s one big old longhorn who liked to come up in the morning after everybody was working. He’d sneak up to the edge and stick his head over the side and scare everybody along the scaffold. You’d just see these horns coming at you. He thought that was so much fun.”

A Rendezvous with Polaris

The way Ross tells it, steadily but surely, he was pulled to Polaris. Born in Philadelphia, Ross was studying math at Berkeley in 1960 when he took a sculpture class. His math grades plummeted: Art was his calling. He finished an M.A. in sculpture in 1962.

He made sets for the Judson Dance Theater and dabbled in performance, including a happening where he, fully clothed, and a woman, nude, were bound together with plastic wrap. His mathematically informed lattice sculptures from that decade resemble twisted CD towers in the Minimalist idiom of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt.

Then, he said, he saw in a dream the plans for a prism. He cleared out his studio and devoted himself to light. From the prisms, Ross grew interested in the Egyptian pyramids.

He was taken with speculation that the Great Pyramid was once painted with the colors of the spectrum. He discovered that the entrance to the Great Pyramid was oriented toward Thuban, the north star in the age of pharaohs, 4,500 years ago. That led him to precession. In 1971, he drew the first plans for “Star Axis.”

On the afternoon I arrived, O’Bryan oriented me to the site. When we reached the viewing chamber at the top of the stairs, her husband was waiting on an angled bench built into the walls. I took a seat on another “You’re leaning against the angle of the sun on the equinox,” O’Bryan said. It was pretty comfortable. Ross started humming. The low tone reverberated around the hard, sharp room.

In the light of day, “Star Axis” appears homemade, even humble. The masonry reflects the ad hoc way the sculpture has come together, season by season, with successive generations of workers from a nearby town. Ross mocked up many of the chambers on site at full scale, with lumber, so he could feel how the angles affect the body.

But “Star Axis” is a precisely engineered instrument. Woodruff Sullivan, the astronomer who, along with Mallory Thorp, helped match each stair to a point in the precession cycle, vouched for Ross’s math. “If it was not important, and especially if it was wrong, I would not be interested in collaborating.”

On the summer solstice, the tip of the pyramid’s shadow traces the near edge of the bowtie-shaped “Shadow Field.” On the winter solstice it follows the opposite side. “Every tree, every pole, every building also draws this shape,” Ross pointed out. “But here you can see it.”

While Ross’s attention to detail is often stunning, he’s more interested in conveying a bodily impression of cosmic time. My encounter was certainly more esoteric than scientific.

Around 10 p.m., the waxing crescent moon cast shadows on the mesa; the shade of the solar pyramid jutted into the crushed white caliche at its base.

By 1 a.m., the moon had set and the stars asserted themselves; the Milky Way ribboned overhead.

A path curls southwest down the side of the mesa to the tunnel entrance. Two sphinx-like sandstone and concrete buttresses gathered me into the structure, through a triangular doorway 47 degrees at its apex

As I climbed the steps through the mesa and into the pyramid, the window at the top of the staircase appeared to expand. I felt drawn up the tunnel, slowly, toward the stars. The wind outside sounded like ocean surf, evoking visions of mariners with their sextants.

I didn’t see the crisp coin of night sky depicted in photos of the piece. The tunnel edges looked webby and murky. But the human eye is not a camera. Ross also pointed out that the staircase is calibrated to someone of average height, which I am not.

I’m not sure I traveled through time, beyond the normal rate. But I felt focused and present. Rather than leave my body behind, I felt grounded within the epochal cycles of the stars, and the 50-year arc of one man’s stellar devotion.

Sunrise on the year’s longest day began as an orange gash over a long purple mesa. The darkness soaked back into the desert. For a few seconds, the east face of the pyramid glowed tangerine. On the other side of the mesa, two yellow bulldozers and a crane sunk into the dirt, their foam seats eaten away. These machines helped build Ross’s sculpture; this summer, one item on his punch list is to sell them.

A long-exposure photograph from the base of the staircase shows the circular paths of the stars as the Earth rotates around its celestial axis.

FULL ARTICLE:

Ray Exworth spent six decades creating one of Britain’s most extraordinary bodies of sculpture – and almost nobody has seen it. Hidden inside a labyrinth of sheds on a remote Cornish smallholding, his vast, obsessive constructions have remained locked away from the world, visited only by a fortunate few. Even his wife Susie, 92, was largely kept out. “I could not visit without an invitation!” she recalls.

Exworth, who died in 2015 aged 84, had just one major exhibition in his lifetime, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975. Since then, the man who might belong among Britain’s most notable artists has disappeared almost entirely. His works – sprawling, intricate and wildly ambitious, assembled from an array of salvaged materials – have remained exactly where he left them: filling seven studio sheds and a scattering of shipping containers, unseen.

A new book by photographer Jem Southam, Ray’s Sheds, provides unprecedented access to Exworth’s stunning work for the first time. Southam believes only 20 people have seen inside Ray’s sheds. His book is not only a detailed document of a exceptional art practice that may never otherwise see the light of day, but an intriguing inquiry into what it means to be an artist – and what the purpose of art is – when it is never publicly seen.

Exworth was born in 1930 in Ipswich, the eldest of five sons. His father, Southam tells me, was a highly skilled but not well paid sandcaster, who would also make toys for his sons during the war. “Ray got his marvel at the skill and craft of making things from his father,” Southam says.

The family’s home was hit in a bombing raid and burned down in 1941; then their next home was also bombed. These traumatic wartime experiences left a mark on Exworth – his sculptures return again and again to childhood memories and objects: clowns, dolls, and even the garden at the family home his father rebuilt from scratch once they were able to return. Exworth made an exact one-to-one replica of the garden from memory, a 60ft by 30ft floor-based sculpture complete with forks, spades, lettuces, flowering roses and bamboo beanpoles – all made of beaten lead. The work, one of three similarly massive lead pieces by Exworth, doesn’t appear in Southam’s new book – it’s so huge that it’s stored away in a container on the smallholding.

Southam first met Exworth in the 1980s. One day Southam received a phone call from the artist inviting him to come and take photographs of his work. “I don’t know how he had heard about me, but I went slightly reluctantly to his tiny cottage. He took me through the tangled garden to the first shed – and as soon as the door slid open and I looked inside, like anyone else who has been there, my jaw dropped. What was inside was astonishing. I knew I was in the presence of a remarkable artist.”

The first shed Southam encountered was known as the circus shed – a space vividly depicted in Southam’s photographs in the book, a sculptural environment (Exworth never referred to them as “installations”) stacked and piled from floor to ceiling with pieces crafted from whatever Exworth could get his hands on – plaster armatures, layered with newspaper and rags, metal, wood, textiles, glass, string and wax, all refined and finessed with ingenuity and skill. Full-size ringmasters, performers, horses, magicians – and a juggler with a frozen cascade of balls in the air are among the myriad figures in the wonderland. For the juggler’s balls, Exworth repurposed steel nails from wooden builders’ pallets, hammering them out and welding them together to create an arch, a painstaking problem-solving process that would have taken months. Exworth worked on The Circus six days a week for an entire decade.

Exworth got the idea, Southam says, while working at the Meteorological Office (as part of his national service in the RAF), when he would pass through Piccadilly Circus regularly, at day and night. “Somehow that morphed into a real circus – wherever he started from, his imagination took over.”

Even Susie remembers being “awestruck by his work” the first time she entered the sheds, several years after Exworth started working in them. “I could not equate the man I knew in our daily life with the man he became when he entered the shed to work.” The photographs capture the low lighting and depth of the space, an unprecedented exploration of the endless mountains of works, some still in progress, partially covered in sheets.

Across the seven sheds, each with their own atmosphere and theme, are life size, lifelike figures and animals, as well as miniatures, tableaux of found objects, ladders, old papers, boxes, buckets, complex assemblages of forms and materials, some indecipherable and unfinished. The workshop shed shows the scale and breadth of Exworth’s technical acuity and thinking – everything from drills, jigsaws, sanders and glass cutters to grinders, putty and tiny paintbrushes.

"He was a genuine artist. To him, making work was more rewarding than presenting it"

Southam initially made 12 exposures on a plate camera for Exworth, for a grant application. The two became friends – but for the next 30 years, “no matter how much I tried, he would never let me in the sheds with a camera again”.

It was only after Exworth died that Southam approached Susie to ask if he could make a photographic record of the work in the sheds, as a way of preserving it. The book took 10 years to make – Southam first shot everything he could on a digital camera, which allowed him to squeeze into the tight corners of the packed sheds, “but I was dissatisfied with the pictures because they didn’t really show what it felt like to be inside these spaces, surrounded by this work”. He returned with a huge, 8x10 Victorian box-like camera and tripod, “with an extremely wide, almost freakish lens” that allowed him to capture the spaces in a more encompassing way.

Southam’s book includes around 60 pictures, as well as accounts of his personal experiences with Ray and in his sheds. There are many more works Southam couldn’t photograph or hasn’t included – such as 700 charcoal drawings Exworth made of the pair of blackbirds that visited the couple’s backdoor every day.

David Heseltine was Exworth’s long-term friend and former colleague at Falmouth School of Art – where Exworth was head of sculpture from 1959 to 1974. Heseltine remembers him as “well read and his art historical knowledge exhaustive. He found genius and inspiration in Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, although his creative vision ran counter to the work of many of his contemporaries, who he thought lacked compassion.”

When Exworth eventually quit teaching to devote himself entirely to his practice, he seems to have had few ambitions beyond quietly tinkering away on his own in his sheds, working on his wild visions – that perhaps transported him back to happier times.

“He was reclusive and, although described as irascible to the Arts Council purchasing committee, he was sensitive, compassionate and passionately interested in people and all aspects of life,” Heseltine says. “He had absolute certainty about his vision, but an amazing humility about what it achieved.”

Ray’s Sheds, Heseltine adds, “is of course much more than an archival record and hugely important to Ray’s legacy. Given that the sculptures are almost immovable and that Ray was more concerned about making than promoting them, the book will be vital in introducing Ray’s work to a much wider audience, in acknowledging his importance, his contribution to 20th-century British art and establishing his rightful status as one of the truly original sculptors of our time.”

The book is also about the unique, unwavering dedication of an artist solely to his craft without pretension. “For me, he was a really genuine artist – solving problems about how to make things. He was engaged in the activity of making, and found that far more rewarding than presenting it. Ray was just engrossed every day in how to move forward and make something.”

As for Susie, she still goes into the sheds frequently – because, she says, “there is a strong feeling of Ray’s presence in each one”.

FULL ARTICE

By Susan Lahey

When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.

In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe

To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.

New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness

Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.

You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.

Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.