The work, titled Declaration, has become an iconic part of the Venice Beach landscape. Weighing in at 25 tons, it is composed of I-beams that are delicately balanced against one another in V-shaped arrangements.

Declaration was initially installed more than 20 years ago, in 2001, as a loan made in tandem with a Venice Family Clinic benefit, so it was never intended to be permanently sited where it is today. But because it has been located for so long near the boardwalk, between a skate park and a police station, it has been integrated into the Venice Beach landscape.

Word that the sculpture may leave Venice Beach was first heard in 2019, when di Suvero and his gallery L.A. Louver failed multiple times to get the City of Los Angeles to acquire the piece. The two were charged with raising the funds needed to keep the work there.

Local outlets in Venice Beach reported this week that Declaration was officially slated for removal, an exact date for which has not yet been determined. The sculpture, now worth $7 million, according to L.A. Louver director Kimberly Davis, is set to be returned to di Suvero himself.

“I am honored that this sculpture has been embraced by the community of Venice for more than two decades,” di Suvero said in a statement to ARTnews. “I’m grateful that it was on view for so long—longer than ever intended—and that it contributed to the identity of this special place.”

The funding for the sculpture has routinely been a sticking point. L.A. Louver paid for it to be installed in the first place, but according to a Los Angeles City Council member quoted by the New York Times in 2019, the gallery had offered the work to the city, but the terms for the donation would’ve required as much as $4 million to be spent in the process. Even after private donors were sought, the city could not afford the work.

Per Yo! Venice!, L.A. Louver had raised less than $2 million in pledges—which is less than half of the work’s value, according to Davis. Now, the work will be disassembled and sent back in pieces to di Suvero’s studio in Petaluma, California.

Peter Goulds, founding director of L.A. Louver, said in a statement, “Even though permanent status could not be achieved in its present location, we are honored to have championed this iconic work, a Los Angeles cultural landmark and the focal point of Venice Beach and its Boardwalk. Everywhere Mark goes, he builds community, and his sculptures do the same. We are immensely proud of our long association with Mark, who is one of the greatest American sculptors of our time, and our support for this key work from his career.”

Corita Kent, yellow submarine, 1967.

ARTHUR EVANS/©CORITA ART CENTER, IMMACULATE HEART COMMUNITY, LOS ANGELES

In the early 1970s, the Art Workers’ Coalition approached ARTnews and three other art publications with a proposal to run an anti–Vietnam War poster on the cover of a future issue. The designated poster featured an image of the My Lai massacre. At the time, ARTnews ran only images of artworks on its cover, and so rejected the proposal, as did the other magazines, but the gesture was an important one. The war had radicalized artists across the United States and beyond; many protested at art museums, while others merged their politics with their work. With the exhibition “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975” on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., we returned to our archives and pulled out articles about artists and that war.

Installation view of “Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam,” 1968, at Paula Cooper Gallery, 96 Prince Street.

COURTESY PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK

Installation view of “Robert Morris,” 1970, at the Whitney Museum, New York.

SUSAN HOROWITZ

Nancy Spero, Fuck, 1966.

©THE NANCY SPERO AND LEON GOLUB FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/COURTESY GALERIE LELONG & CO.

Dinh Q. Lê, The Scroll of Thich Quang Duc (detail), 2013.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND P.P.O.W GALLERY, NEW YORK

A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 111 under the title “The War Comes Home.”

The blue neon sign is the work of Tavares Strachan, one of seventeen artists featured in “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change,” on view at Storm King—both among the permanent fixtures in the outdoor sculpture park and in the center’s building—through November 11. According to the Storm King website, the exhibition, organized by Nora Lawrence and David Collens, engages with “some of the many challenges—scientific, cultural, personal, psychological—that climate change has brought to humankind.” Several pieces offer an almost whimsical take on the issue, juxtaposing palm trees, a weather station, and other objects with the park’s manicured grounds to bring home the uncanny nature of apocalypse. Other works use documentation of scientific exploration and research for aesthetic effect or to gain insight into how we arrived at this juncture. All of the artists, however, are clearly struggling with the problem of articulating the gravity of the crisis.

Storm King is an appropriate place for an exhibition about climate change. Glaciers shaped the surrounding rocky landscape, carving out the valley as they moved through some fifteen thousand years ago. The center was founded in 1960 to exhibit large-scale outdoor artworks, and the monumental pieces that dot the sprawling 500-acre grounds gesture toward long stretches of time. Hulking metal sculptures by Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, and Mark di Suvero emerge from the trees like ruins of an ancient civilization. What better place to contemplate the end of the world?

Maya Lin has several pieces in the exhibition, as well as permanent works on the grounds. The Secret Life of Grasses (2018), an installation for “Indicators,” features a collection of clear ten-foot tubes standing upright, supported by wooden struts, and filled with dirt. On top of each grows a different species of wild grass, its root system reaching down the full length of the tube. They look like core samples—cylindrical cuts of the earth drawn out to reveal what’s below—or the last remaining specimens in a future stripped of biodiversity and arable land.

Beyond Lin’s piece, several palm fronds peek above the crest of a short steep ridge, jarringly out of place among the native deciduous trees. Mary Mattingly intended this sense of dislocation with her living installation Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest (2018). Three palm trees—a Paurotis, a Ponytail, and a Coconut—transplanted from a nursery in Homestead, Florida, stand together to form a strange, miniature tropical forest. Mattingly said in an interview that “the piece uses the language of an architectural folly to construct something that’s uncanny and out of place.” It raises the specter of climate migration for plants and people alike, suggesting that any resilience strategy will have to be drastic.

According to a New York State environmental report, climate change will raise the median temperature of the Hudson Valley by six to eleven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. This increase will transform Storm King’s environs into a subtropical zone, perfect for the trees Mattingly planted. Homestead, however, will be underwater, along with most of coastal Florida.

Along with plants, the Arctic serves as a recurring motif in the exhibition. One of Lin’s other contributions is a pair of white topographic reliefs of the North and South poles: 59 Words for Snow and Before It Slips Away. Strachan’s work, in the same room as his blue neon sign, documents his 2013 trip to the North Pole. Strachan followed the route of the 1908–09 expedition to the North Pole taken by Matthew Henson, an African American man who accompanied famed explorer Robert Peary on several missions but was largely written out of history. In a long, narrow lightbox that spans half of the wall and turns the corner, an illuminated image shows Strachan standing in an ice-bound landscape. Next to him, a black, gold, and turquoise flag is planted in the ice, a reinterpretation of the flag from Peary’s expedition.

Ellie Ga’s work in a nearby room also derives from a trip to the Arctic. In 2007, Ga spent five months in residence aboard the research vessel Tara, accompanying a scientific expedition to study how global warming affects pack ice. Sliver-gelatin prints of ghostly shovels and explorers in the snow hang beside a hand-drawn map from the expedition that collates her crewmates’ descriptions of the ice around the ship. These collections not only represent voyages into icy, inhospitable climates but also engage with the underlying imperialist drive behind scientific exploration—the ruinous desire to quantify and conquer the planet for extractive value.

Perhaps the Arctic features so prominently in the exhibition because it is where climate change is most readily visible, in the glaciers breaking apart and melting away. One of climate change’s most intractable qualities—perhaps the one that will ultimately seal our fate—is the difficulty of conceptualizing it due to its scale and complexity.

The philosopher Timothy Morton coined the term “hyperobject” to describe phenomena that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Climate change is Morton’s hyperobject par excellence. It is an enormous network of causes and effects distributed across time and geography. Individuals understand that climate change exists but have trouble locating themselves in relation to it. We recognize its extreme symptoms—a hurricane, melting glaciers, wildfires in California—but not its mundane trappings, like an AC unit, a supermarket, or a plane traveling across the sky. Climate change is so embedded in the infrastructure of modern life that it is all but invisible.

Art would seem well suited to represent this intangible object in comprehensible ways, to bring this “embeddedness” to the fore. But it often falls short. Several pieces in “Indicators” endeavor to convey messages in an activist manner. One such attempt is a gold-gilded electronic road sign by Justin Brice Guariglia that blinks out aphoristic environmental warnings (written with Morton) like “DANGER: ANTHROPOCENTRISM” and “WARNING: HURRICANE HUMAN.”  Another is a series of black-and-white flags by the collective Dear Climate bearing slogans such as “SEE THE SEA LEVELS” or “GO FERAL.” These pieces, however, seem more like a reminder of the ineffectiveness of sloganeering than the crisis at hand.

Other artists in the exhibition instead use emotive visual metaphors to embody our potential losses—to create memento mori for industrial civilization. Jenny Kendler’s Underground Library (2017–18) comprises ten books on climate change from the last five decades that the artist has collected and “biocharred,” or burned slowly in low oxygen to sequester carbon. The resulting jet-black shells offer a haunting elegy to books that have outlived their function. When the exhibition closes, they will be buried on the grounds at Storm King, thus preventing their carbon from entering the atmosphere.

Similarly, for Permanent Field Observations (2018), David Brooks cast thirty natural objects—rocks, tree roots, fungi, parts of a deer skeleton—in bronze and set them next to the originals in the woods that runs along the border of Storm King. In a statement, Brooks writes that the replicas will “act as time capsules” as the weather and environment changes. It is the only piece in “Indicators” that will remain on view after the exhibition closes; perhaps the casts will outlive the art center entirely.

In an exhibition dominated by sculptural objects, it is a video that most eloquently evokes the scale of climate change’s primary cause: the fossil fuel industry. Steve Rowell’s Midstream at Twilight (2016) follows the network of pipelines and overland transport from the Alberta Tar Sands to Chicago and on to the ports of southern California. “Midstream” is oil-and-gas-industry slang for the transportation network that brings petrochemicals to market. Shot by drone from above, the video traces the route in the style of a nature film, tracking natural phenomena so large that only an aerial perspective can make them visually comprehensible. The video has mostly ambient sound but toward the end the title theme from A Clockwork Orange starts to play. It is a synthesizer performance by Wendy Carlos of Henry Purcell’s 1695 Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. Rowell chose the piece because the original was composed before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while the Carlos version was made near its end. The echoing electric harpsichord gives an otherworldly aura to seemingly benign lengths of pipeline, oil tanks, and shipping containers. The effect is hypnotic and terrifying: a sense of what we have collectively set in motion and how hard it will be to reverse.

Conveying the enormity of climate change through discrete objects is the central challenge of contemporary environmental art, if not the single greatest philosophical problem of our era. It may be too late to stop the pack ice from melting or global temperatures from rising, but it is not too late to come to terms with what is happening. The strongest works in the show use temporal and geographic dislocation to bring these unsettling truths into the here and now. This is not advocacy, but rather the visceral communication of reality. Lies may be prettier, but climate change is here. We have to live with it, one way or another.

The latest addition to the Dallas skyline is the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, a soaring structure that spans the Trinity River. Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and named after the daughter of famed oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, the bridge is part of the Trinity River Project, an ambitious plan to connect neighborhoods that had long been separated by the city’s primary waterway. As with almost everything in the “Big D,” there’s an element of overkill to the project. What could have been a simple public highway paid for with state and local funds was upgraded to an iconic monument through generous private donations. In all, Calatrava has been commissioned to design three bridges here, the second of which is nearing completion as I write.  

The Calatrava building spree reveals a lot about the priorities of the business elite in Dallas. For the past few decades, civic leaders have been attempting to transform the landlocked prairie city into a world-class art destination by endowing cultural institutions with big budgets and importing big-name artists and architects. These efforts, which include the creation of a centralized Arts District downtown, are laudable in many respects. And who’s to complain if altruistic initiatives to serve the public good also happen to generate profits for well-positioned real-estate developers? Trouble is, the grand vision of the elite often overlooks the needs of the city’s increasingly diverse citizenry.    

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, for example, is meant to symbolize the “opening” of West Dallas. Previously isolated, that area has historically been home to Latino and African-American communities, whose members were forced to reside in a part of the city underserved by transportation infrastructure due to Dallas’s long-standing segregationist policies. Now that the downtown financial district is only minutes away—a quick drive across a resplendent trophy bridge—real estate speculators have begun to take notice of West Dallas, and the process of gentrification has already been set in motion. In recent months, the area has seen the dislocation of the working poor, the closure of some of the neighborhood’s oldest restaurants, the arrival of a few artists, the opening of a handful of higher-end eateries and the establishment of one or two contemporary art galleries.

The city boosters have always tried to present an image of their town as a place apart from the rest of Texas and unique in the world. This cherished singularity of identity is very much at the heart of the Dallas Myth, which equates progress with the grit and determination of civic leaders, most of whom have been drawn from the upper echelons of the business community. And that community, in turn, has been dependent, during its ascendancy, on commodities—cattle, cotton and oil—and retail trade. In the past, Texans tried to convince anyone who would listen that the state had the resources to go it alone. It’s true that Texas overall and Dallas in particular are rich. Yet, as oil continues to hover at a low $40 a barrel, this imperious attitude of self-reliance is looking increasingly arrogant and unrealistic.

Dallas is also a city divided by class and race. The “Dallas Way”—another term well-heeled residents often use to describe a sense of exceptionalism—is, as many historians of the city have pointed out, mostly shorthand for the “North Dallas Way.” It represents, in other words, the cultural perspective of the wealthy white business leaders who reside in the lush environs of the so-called Park Cities. The Dallas government’s attempts at urban planning over the decades have resulted in an urban area partitioned by freeways. Yet even as these car-centric schemes cemented the city’s internal social divides, they have been integral to establishing Dallas as a major hub within state and national transportation networks. 

A city that was once a remote trading post in a state that was an independent republic cannot cling to the illusion of autonomy while also betting on its future position in a global economy. This tension has always existed within the Dallas Myth: the desire to be part of a top-tier community of world cities on the one hand, and the need to retain a stubbornly independent spirit on the other. Since the city’s founding, business leaders have dreamt of using the Trinity River as a grand waterway to connect their city on the prairie to the port of Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico. By the 1970s, when the project of transforming the meandering river into an industrial canal was feasible from an engineering standpoint, its rationale had already been undermined by the newly constructed Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.[pq]A city that was once a remote trading post in a state that was an independent republic cannot cling to the illusion of autonomy while also betting on its future position in a global economy.[/pq]Today, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is one of the most well-connected hubs for air travel in the world, a position that confers bragging rights and fosters new businesses while also forcing civic leaders to understand Dallas as a networked, global city outgrowing its former economic reliance on commodities and extractive industries. An article of faith among the policy makers influencing the direction of a globalized Dallas is that a robust offering of art and cultural attractions is a prerequisite for luring 21st-century corporations and skilled, highly educated professionals. 

In fact, the relationship between business and art in Dallas is long-standing, having matured at a tremendous rate over the past half-century or so. Of all the business leaders who have made their mark on Dallas’s cultural scene, it is probably the oilmen and the retailers who head the list, mostly through their involvement with the Arts District development. 

The Dallas Arts District was conceived in the late 1970s and refined by a succession of urban-planning consultants. In 1984, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA)—designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes—was the first major institution to find a home downtown. The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center—designed by I. M. Pei—followed, in 1989. By 2009, the Arts District also included the Crow Collection of Asian Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center (by Renzo Piano) and the AT&T Performing Arts Center. The last comprises an opera house designed by Norman Foster and a theater by Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas. Many of the commissioned architects—Pei, Piano, Foster and Koolhaas—are Pritzker Prize laureates. The administration of the Arts District is overseen by a board dominated by city boosters affiliated with banking, real estate and other corporate interests. 

These board members are heirs to a tradition of arts patronage that began with Dallas’s great retail magnates. Leon Harris Jr., Stanley Marcus and Raymond D. Nasher each had a profound effect on Dallas’s cultural institutions. Harris, of A. Harris & Company department stores, is famous for promoting Southwest fashion in France during the 1950s and commissioning the émigré German artist George Grosz in 1952 to produce a series of paintings to celebrate the store’s 65th anniversary. Marcus was the chief executive of the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, founded by his father and his aunt in 1907. Nicknamed the “Merchant Prince” by D Magazine, Marcus served as chairman of the board of directors of the DMA and founded the Dallas Opera. Nasher’s NorthPark Center—built in 1965 on a 97-acre cotton field—was the largest enclosed shopping center in the world for many years. On view at the mall have been works by such artists as Mark di Suvero, Frank Stella and Anthony Caro, all drawn from Nasher’s exceptional private collection. Indeed, the displays at the mall anticipated the offerings of the nonprofit Nasher Sculpture Center, which opened in 2003. 

The art-business relationship, however, has not been without its controversies. In the mid-20th century, the challenge for patrons like Harris and Marcus was to demonstrate that contemporary art of the time—including work by members of the New York School—was not politically rebellious but, in fact, perfectly compatible with the Dallas Way. This was not always a simple task in a period when Texas congressperson and notorious red-baiter Martin Dies Jr. was denouncing such works as “subversive” and “Communistic.” Marcus, for his part, championed a program by which the DMA would display contemporary art from the collections of non-Dallas businessmen with impeccable political credentials. This helped calm any shaky nerves as the museum initiated a program to purchase works by artists including Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder—pieces that are now the jewels of the museum’s collection. 

In this context, Harris’s 1952 decision to commission Grosz—a former member of the German Communist Party—to produce a suite of paintings depicting Dallas as a rising metropolis is breathtaking in its perversity and audacity (or, perhaps, naïveté). Grosz’s ambivalence toward the commission—which would have been worth well over $100,000 in today’s dollars—is documented in the catalogue that accompanied a superb 2013 exhibition at the DMA of the original works and their contextual materials. Grosz produced oils and waterclors depicting the Dallas skyline and other views of life in this fast-growing city: the bustling crowds and illuminated entertainment and shopping districts and, in rather dull portrayals, emblems of the oil, cotton and cattle wealth of North Texas. Far more interesting were Grosz’s impressions of Deep Ellum—an area of Dallas settled after the Civil War as a “freedmen’s town,” and probably not a neighborhood much visited by Harris’s peers in the Chamber of Commerce.

The business elite who have spearheaded social and cultural improvements in the city tend to be regarded as comprising a benign oligarchy.[pq]For artists who have made Dallas their home, especially younger artists drawn to this city by high expectations and the promise of low rents, the benefits of the city’s rapid development will not appear so crystalline.[/pq]Historically, their decisions have sometimes required public funds or at least the stamp of broader public approval. Whether through referendums or bond initiatives, generations of ordinary citizens have voted to dig deep into their own pockets and contribute to grand visions. Schemes that would have an enormous impact on business, such as the rail service linking Dallas with the Midwest and the West in the 19th century or the hosting of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park, were enthusiastically embraced by the public at large, even if the ultimate effect of these projects on the general well-being of the citizenry remains open to question.

Cultural development has proceeded along similar lines. In Dallas, there is currently a lively debate taking place over the relationship between local artists, local galleries and the high-profile Arts District. The city government seems unable to make good on its early promise to turn the district into a real home for artists, and instead appears content to allow developers to ring this urban showcase for the work of starchitects with impossibly expensive luxury high-rise condominiums. Some artists are concerned that Dallas has invested heavily in marquee work by outsiders and is only belatedly coming to grips with the issue of how to support any sort of creative economy on the ground. I believe that the large and internationally renowned cultural institutions of Dallas present a convincing argument that Dallas really does know how to connect with the rest of the world. Yet, for artists who have made Dallas their home, especially younger artists drawn to this city by high expectations and the promise of low rents, the benefits of the city’s rapid development will not appear so crystalline.

There is already anecdotal evidence, reported in Glasstire, the region’s widely read online art magazine, that the increase in population owing to the growth of employment opportunities in and around the city has resulted in an increased pressure to gentrify formerly low-rent neighborhoods like Oak Cliff or The Cedars. Gentrification leads to higher rents and property values in such areas, which have traditionally been occupied by artists, the lower middle-class and the working poor. These neighborhoods wouldn’t ordinarily be so desirable were it not for the distinctive character imparted by the people—and not simply the artists and artisans—who call it home. Critics writing in Glasstire frequently bemoan the fact that artists are being priced out of Dallas and other cities, but it’s not a problem for artists alone.

When speaking of the growth of cities, it is always crucial to make a distinction between the culture of an urban center and its elite art institutions. A city’s institutions will always have an impact on the community of artists, whether or not this relationship is articulated explicitly or instrumentalized in the form of programs (like reduced admission fees and sophisticated educational initiatives) that widen professional access to the museum, symphony hall or theater. Yet only the most reductive of imaginations could conceive of the symbolic representation of “the arts” in a giant downtown edifice as the arts themselves. The latter develops elsewhere, in affordable studio spaces, small nonprofit spaces and art schools. Though less spectacular, these institutions require nurturing as well. Still, the very existence of highly visible cultural institutions reflects back on the entire milieu of art in Dallas, and if we can see beyond the glittering facade, we may catch a glimpse of a vital local art world that is reinventing the meaning of the Dallas Way.

Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus No. 4, made from Gütermann thread, wood, and nails, was on view at the Dallas Contemporary in 2010.COURTESY FLAVORWIRE

Sixteen Romanesque Biblical manuscripts known together as as “The Idda Collection” will go on display, for sale, at the Les Enluminures Gallery in New York from April 9-May 2. Dated between 980-1240, the manuscripts are priced from $180,000 to $6.5m—the latter is the asking price for a tenth-century Latin Liesborn Gospel Book in near-perfect condition. [The Art Newspaper]

On Friday morning, a construction crane fell on the roof of the Dallas Museum of Art,  causing slight damage to the building and narrowly missing Ave, a sculpture by Mark Di Suvero. (Coincidentally, Suvero had trained as a crane operator to make the 12,000-pound sculpture.) Only the south end of the museum is closed temporarily. [Dallas Morning News]

Dallas’s SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival will be renamed the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival in honor of Nasher and Haemisegger’s recently announced five-million-dollar gift to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra organizes the festival, which features artists like Pipilotti Rist, Alex Prager, and Yael Bartana. [Artforum]

Richard Phillips, an artist known for his large-scale, pop culture-themed paintings, has been voted to the board of directors of the Dallas Contemporary, a non-collecting contemporary art museum founded in 1978. [Artforum]

Christian Keesee has donated fifty Brett Weston photos to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Keesee has already donated 410 Weston photos to the museum over the past ten years. [The Oklahoman]

Artist Caitlin Cherry has been selected as one of five winners of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts. She and four others—soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Sean Chen, actress, writer, and filmmaker McKenzie Chinn, and dancer Joseph Gorak—will receive stipends totaling $300,000. (Cherry will receive $50,000.) [The New York Times]

The headline for this article reads, “Someone put their sunglasses and watch down in an art gallery—and people thought it was a piece of art.” [Mirror]

Museums have begun “deaccessioning” works due to lack of funds and and debt. [Smithsonian Magazine]

On Monday afternoon, President Obama will award the 2011 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal in the East Room of the White House. The First Lady will also be present.

This presentation will be live streamed at www.WhiteHouse.gov/Live, starting at 1:45 Eastern time.

Mark di Suvero was the 2010 honoree. Previous art-world recipients have included Maya Lin (2009), Jesús Moroles (2008), Philippe de Montebello (2002), Helen Frankenthaler (2001) and Louise Bourgeois (1997).

Established by Congress in 1984, the National Medal of Arts is managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Nominations for the recipients are solicited each year, and the National Council on the Arts reviews the nominations and provides recommendations to the President, who selects the honorees.

UPDATE: At 5:30 on Friday, the NEA announced the recipients. Artist honorees will be Will Barnet, painter and printmaker, and Martin Puryear, sculptor. Other recipients include actor Al Pacino and arts patron Emily Rauh Pulitzer.

“I’ll meet you at the big red thing,” one Occupy Wall Streeter was heard saying into his cell phone-the “thing” being Mark di Suvero’s 1997 work Joie de Vivre. That same big red thing also became the perch for a rogue protestor, 21-year-old Dylan Spoelstra of Canada, who climbed the 70-foot-tall sculpture early on Saturday morning and refused to come down until New York’s Mayor Bloomberg resigned. Three hours later he decamped for Bellevue and a psychiatric evaluation.

The totemic sculpture, situated at one end of Zuccotti Park, has been a beacon amid the clutter of the amorphous, anti-greed movement whose members are camped out in the small park, which was heavily damaged in 9/11 and was for a while known as Liberty Park. Another silent sentry in the midst of the action is Isamu Noguchi’s monumental Red Cube (1968), just across the street, on the plaza of 140 Broadway, a protestor’s shout away.

An illustration accompanying a “Talk of the Town” piece in the Oct. 17 New Yorker even depicts the di Suvero work in a montage of placard-carrying protestors, but the article makes no mention of it. The sculpture, resembling intersecting Vs or tripods stood on one end, was sited in 2006, a gift of Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. It is the artist’s first permanent public work in New York.

With some critics lamenting that OWS so far lacks a musical anthem, an integral component of the social movements of yore, will Joie perhaps become its visual icon, the peace sign of our times? Or will distracting and credibility-detracting antics like Spoelstra’s and Occupy Artists Space derail what should be a serious conversation?

Emerging in the 1970s, when his monumental steel structures appeared in public spaces in all five boroughs of New York, Mark di Suvero’s marvels of balance, space, color and geometric form permeate the daily lives of people worldwide. Yet his exhibition of 11 monumental works, currently on view on Governors Island, is his first major show in New York in 25 years.

Organized by Storm King Arts Center, where di Suvero has mounted three exhibitions, this is Governors Island’s most ambitious show to date. Di Suvero is a shipbuilder and steel worker by training, so it seems especially fitting that his sculptures have found a home on the former military island, where they quietly dominate fields flush with weekend visitors. Here, the works feel like stately remnants from ages past.

Originally creating sculptures made out of wood, di Suvero first began working with steel after a near fatal accident in 1960, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. In order to continue to work, he learned how to operate a crane in order to make his art.

A lifelong activist for peace and social justice, di Suvero, who once stormed the Mall in Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War, was honored in March by President Obama with a National Medal for the Arts, an award also bestowed this year on icons like Meryl Streep, Joyce Carol Oates and James Taylor, among others.

A.i.A. met with Mark di Suvero in his studio in Long Island City, which abuts the Socrates Sculpture Park, the foundation he established in 1986 for young artists to create and exhibit work. The studio, which opens onto the East River, and consists of maze of studios, workshops, artist lofts and galleries, is a world unto itself, and speaks to the artist’s interests in art-into-life, interactivity, and community.

WALSH: Why is the public domain so important to you?

DI SUVERO: When one is an artist, one wants to do art that is meaningful to a lot of people. Most art is shown in museums and galleries, which eliminates a whole population. By putting it out on the streets, you open it up to the world.

In the 1960s, people thought that we were putting our art into the streets for our own self-promotion. They didn’t get that there’s a great thing that happens when you have outdoor works where people are interacting and searching. After World War II, any works that were abstract or non-figurative were seen as being communist, too intellectual. People thought that if you were making that kind of art, you didn’t want to be understood.

WALSH: What early public works made an impact on you?

DI SUVERO: I remember when they first put the Calder in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When that happened, it was stunning. It was the first large piece outdoors in the area, installed in 1967, and it was supported by the government. It was done by people who wanted to have something other than a dull, boring Midwestern town with no center.

It really changed that town. The garbage men actually wear the Calder as the logo on their uniforms. It’s on their city cars. The city logo is the Calder. The sculpture really changed the urban landscape, and it really excited people.

WALSH: In New York in the 1960s and ’70s, how did you fabricate such large-scale works?

DI SUVERO: There was no market. No one bought anything. Before I became a sculptor, I was a house painter and an apprentice boat builder. When I came to the city, I was always able to build someone’s loft.

When I started making art, I lived in the fish market, above a fish store. Every day, I swept their floors, and they would give me a fish. That’s all you need: a fish and rice. It really keeps expenses down.

A friend of mine, Neil Williams, had a loft downstairs, that got burned in a fire. He asked me to save what was left after the fireman went through. I had a spare mattress, and a hanging tire. So I put the mattress in the tire, and I realized that it was a great way to sleep. That’s when I started making swinging beds. I still sleep in a swinging bed.

WALSH: You were, early on, crucial at building community among like-minded artists, struggling financially as you were—particularly at Park Place, which ended up being the first gallery in Soho.

DI SUVERO: Park Place was a cooperative that we put together in 1962, with people like Frosty Myers, Robert Grovsenor and Anthony Magar, to name just a few. A lot of people would stop in, and then immediately move uptown, which was the best place to be represented, by the galleries up there. We gave Sol LeWitt one of his first exhibitions, before he moved uptown.

We hired a director, and she gave our works to the collectors, and they paid our rent. The director was originally John Gibson, and then it was Paula Cooper.

WALSH: Your first exhibition was with Dick Bellamy at the Greene Gallery, and you and he had a long-standing friendship. How did that relationship grow?

DI SUVERO: He also gave first shows to people like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Mike Heizer. The list is huge and very long. But he wasn’t very financially very motivated. At the end of his life, he ended up living here, in my studio in Long Island City. We would see him all of the time, in his boxers, with an old sandwich in his hand. He would sleep on the floor. He had an unusual charm.

WALSH: In 1960, you were paralyzed. This changed your very physical practice, and you also shifted from working in wood to metal.

DI SUVERO: I was able to work anyway, but I suffered from depression. Paralysis is awful. It’s like part-death. But there is a will in human beings to persevere. No matter how much you put into your art, it gives you back more. Because after a piece is finished, you have the reward of seeing it, and you have the reward of having other people respond to it. It’s a weird justification.

WALSH: You’ve recovered the use of your legs, and still very much use your own hands in your work-bending the steel, operating the crane. The show at Governors Island must seem like something of a return to the place where you were in the 1970s, when you created so many public works in New York .

DI SUVERO: I still suffer through dark periods, though. I don’t call them depressions now. I think about how much my work has failed, in the sense that it hasn’t achieved that kind of rapture I was hoping for. And then you get depressed how much you repeat yourself, how much you have not explored. Exploration for exploration sake is not enough. You need to make exploration work for the art, for the next step. Then it’s worth doing.

I want my work to be poetry. It’s a way of emotionally understanding and handling the world through language. But people are weary of poetry. They don’t trust it.

WALSH: In a world in which information moves through so many new channels, how do you define public art? How do you define it against an iconic work of art, like, say, Jeff Koons’ Puppy?

DI SUVERO: I think that as a contemporary artist, I am doing something quite different from Jeff Koons. He is disseminating his work to the media, which leads them to the market. Koons works in the tradition of advertising billboards. It doesn’t have that real juice of life, the kind of life that opens up to show you what you can possibly do, in the most feeling way. It’s “anesthetic” art, meaning “not aesthetic.” It’s made numb.

WALSH: You say that your work isn’t anthropomorphic, or that you try for it not to be. The titles of the pieces are vague, and not easy to decipher as narratives? Could you explain what you are trying to achieve besides poetry, both materially and formally?

DI SUVERO: I like to do interactive work. I really believe that the piece needs to be all the way around you. We see in about 210 degrees, but you feel what there is at the very edge of vision. A painting, unless it’s a panorama, is an object in the distance. And you look through a frame. With sculpture, you can get inside of it. It gives you a different kind of a feeling.

The journalists at Governor’s Island, during the preview, asked me: “What are you doing with your work?” And I told them: “I’m creating orgasmic space. You don’t know it until you feel it. So you have to walk inside the piece.” And the next thing I knew, all of them were climbing inside of the work.

WALSH: When I went to visit the show, there were signs all over the park saying “DO NOT CLIMB.” But there are kids playing all over She (1977–78), and it really seemed like that was your intention, for kids to be able to inhabit the space.

DI SUVERO: [Laughs] It was my intention! I used to build toys for kids in the ghetto, back in the 1960s when I lived in the fish markets. I thought I was doing something for them, but instead they were teaching me.

WALSH: What were they teaching you?

DI SUVERO: Questions of balance, what works in a toy. Very complicated toys break down, and once they’re broken, they’re broken. They taught me not to work with chains. Because chains, when they wrap around an arm, are excruciating. With a rope, it’s OK.

Sculptor Mark di Suvero is among the 10 honorees being presented with a 2010 National Medal of Arts by President Obama. The ceremony will stream live on www.WhiteHouse.gov/Live today at 1:45 pm. It will also include the awarding of the National Medal of Humanities.

Di Suvero, best known for his muscular, monumental abstract sculptures, is being commended for his works that “depict a strong political and social vision, demonstrating the power of the arts to improve our world.” The artist also founded Socrates Sculpture Park in 1986 in Long Island City, Queens, which is adjacent to his studio property. The park site had been an illegal dump on city-owned land.

The other Medal of Arts recipients are actress Meryl Streep; musicians Quincy Jones, James Taylor, Van Cliburn and Sonny Rollins; novelist Harper Lee; poet Donald Hall; theater producer Robert Brustein; and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

To celebrate its fiftieth year, this weekend Storm King Art Center opens a pair of exhibitions that take a look forward and a look back. In the last century, Storm King has evolved from what was first envisioned as a regional museum of Hudson Valley painters to a 500-acre park known for large-scale sculptural works that interact with landscape. This dedication to sculpture began to develop in the late 60s and early 70s, after Storm King founder Ralph E. Ogden (a manufacturer turned appreciator of more precious forms) saw David Smith’s sculptures set in the fields around the artist’s home in Bolton Landing, New York; the Art Center promptly bought 13 works from the artist’s estate.

5+5: New Perspectives consists of large-scale sculptural work by five artists who are represented in and have helped define the Storm King collection (Alice Aycock, Chakaia Booker, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Usula von Rydingsvard); and five artists who are new to the sculpture park (John Bisbee, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Darrell Petit, Alyson Shotz, Stephen Talasnik).

The new exhibition inside Storm King’s granite Museum Building—originally the residence of New York lawyer Vermont Hatch in the 1930s—The View From Here: Storm King at Fifty examines different aspects of the sculpture park’s history. Galleries document early years in Storm King’s collection, and explain how the Art Center acquires, sites and maintains its works. Individual rooms have been devoted to artists whose works have figured significantly in the Storm King collection: Alexander Calder, David Smith, Claes Oldenburg. The steps of the artists’ work process are revealed here. In the Calder room, you can see a marked-up aluminum model of one of his works, and the section devoted to Oldenburg features fabrication sketches and drawings for his 1979 installation Wayside Drainpipe. LEFT: URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD, LUBA, 2009–2010. COURTESY GALIERIE LELONG, PHOTO BY JERRY L THOMPSON

In these fiftieth year exhibitions, even the new and recent works by artists appearing for the first time at Storm King acknowledge the history of the sculpture park and the sculptures that have come before them. Talasnik’s Stream is a 15-foot-long, 12-foot-tall kidney-shaped structure of lashed-together bamboo, recalling his influences of rollercoasters, architecture and time spent in Asia. The site-specific Stream abuts a hill just below the Museum Building; it’s a particular part of the park, which according to Storm King curator David Collens had not been used before. Talasnik chose the spot, the artist explained while completing the installation Thursday afternoon, for its proximity to works by artists who have inspired him, particularly Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi’s Momo Taro (1977–1978) rides the top of the hill. The landscape architect’s 40-ton, stone interpretation of the Japanese legend—the story of a boy born from a peach—is explained in a framed, handwritten letter (with carets and crossed-out lines) on display in The View From Here.

Another work involves the entirety of Storm King, in a sense. Gonzalez’s interactive You & Me (2010) asks visitors to stand at marked points in the park and follow the artist’s suggested sightlines. This creates new views of older work on the grounds (framing di Suveros and Calders in the distance) and of fellow visitors standing at other points. Gonzalez’s project is another, artist-imposed way of experiencing Storm King, which can otherwise feel a bit like a browsing a greatest-hits collection of 20th and 21st century sculpture if your visit is rushed.

THE VIEW FROM HERE OPENS JUNE 5. STORM KING ART CENTER IS LOCATED AT OLD PLEASANT VILL ROAD, MOUNTAINVILLE, NEW YORK.