Storm King Art Center presents the 2015 special exhibition, Lynda Benglis: Water Sources, comprising large-scale sculptures and fountains installed outdoors, across Storm King’s 500-acre site, and inside Storm King’s Museum Building. Also on view for the 2015 season will be a large-scale temporary installation and a body of new, indoor work by artist Luke Stettner, part of Storm King’s annual Outlooks series. Both exhibitions open May 16 and are on view through November 2015. Storm King opens for the season on April 1, and remains open to visitors until November 29, 2015.

Lynda Benglis: Water Sources includes more than ten outdoor sculptures—some recently created and on view for the first time—as well as a selection of sculptural works installed throughout six galleries in the Museum Building. Many of the outdoor works are fountains—some created in bronze, others in various colors of cast pigmented polyurethane—and several have never before been exhibited publicly. Indoors, the exhibition will include works in bronze and stone made in the early 1990s, soon after Benglis established a residence in the Southwest. These take the idea of landscape—in particular the rock formations of New Mexico—as their conceptual foundation, while the related exterior fountains meditate on the flow of water and the human body, as well as the idea of plenty and abundance. 

Otherworldly landscapes, views of peaks and valleys, moss found growing on the underside of a fountain, and visions of clouds resulting from atomic explosions served as inspiration for the three small-scale fountains that will be shown on the Museum Building’s patio. The works on view date from 1974 to today, and range in scale from two and a half feet to 24 feet tall. A newly completed work will be on view for the first time, titled Hill and Clouds, 2015. The work glows in the dark and will be featured in Storm King’s periodic Moonlit Walks. Two other bronze works—Migrating Pedmarks and Cloak-Wave/Pedmarks, 1998—were important to Benglis’s thinking about fountains and will greet arriving visitors near Storm King’s main entrance. Formed from clay skins, these were cut from large blocks of clay pressed onto underlying plaster and subsequently cast in bronze. The resulting cloaked figures retain the imprints of Benglis’s fingers and call to mind the accounting of a prehistoric event.
 
Benglis has been represented in Storm King’s permanent collection since 1974, when Nu, a knotted work made that year that is part of a series of characters from the Greek alphabet, was acquired. Lynda Benglis: Water Sources is the first exhibition to concentrate on and bring together a major body of outdoor work created by Benglis. 
 
The exhibition is co-curated by Storm King’s Director and Chief Curator, David R. Collens, and Curator Nora Lawrence.  Collens explains, “Lynda Benglis’s work has been an important part of Storm King’s permanent collection for many years and we are delighted to give visitors the opportunity to experience such an ambitious selection of her sculptures. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s keen interpretation of landscape, and so Storm King is the perfect place for presenting Water Sources.”
 
Benglis says of working at Storm King Art Center, “I want to be there forever. It’s really a pleasure to be at Storm King—with the billowing grasses—I want to spend more time there. This is the first, and the first major, showing of the fountains as a group, and a nice setting for them.”
 
Storm King will publish a fully illustrated catalogue of the Lynda Benglis: Water Sources exhibition, available for purchase in Storm King Art Center’s museum store and on its website: http://shop.stormking.org/. 
 
Outlooks: Luke Stettner will be the third in this exhibition series, which invites one emerging or mid-career contemporary artist to create a new, site-specific work to be installed at Storm King for a single season. Outlooks: Luke Stettner will include new photographs, drawings, and sculptures of hand-made paper inside Storm King’s Museum Building, and a large-scale, outdoor charcoal installation. 
 
Support for education-related programming is provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, and artist talks are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

About Lynda Benglis
In America, Lynda Benglis lives and fabricates in New York, Santa Fe, NM and Walla Walla, WA.  She is also inspired by and works in her domiciles in Greece and India.  Lynda Benglis was first recognized in the late sixties with her poured latex and foam works. Benglis’s work is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft, and gestures are frozen. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s work is in extensive public collections including: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Benglis was the subject of an international retrospective which traveled to The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from 2009–2011. An exhibition of her work is on view at the Hepworth Wakefield, U.K., from February–July 2015. Lynda Benglis is represented by Cheim & Read, New York. For more information visit Cheim & Read.
 
About Storm King Art Center
Located in New York’s Hudson Valley about an hour north of the George Washington Bridge, Storm King is one of the world’s leading sculpture parks, encompassing over 500 acres of rolling hills, verdant fields, and woodlands. These provide space for a collection of more than 100 large-scale sculptures by some of the most acclaimed artists of our time, including Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Zhang Huan, Maya Lin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, David Smith, and Ursula von Rydingsvard among others.
 
Storm King is located at 1 Museum Road in New Windsor, New York, one hour from New York City. For information about hours and admission, public transportation, directions, Zipcar discounts, special events, family activities, bike rentals, and the cafe, visit www.stormking.org, or call 845-534-3115.