During flight, rough air can be a frightening experience. On the ground, tornadoes and hurricanes wreak havoc. For Alice Aycock, a sculptor and installation artist, turbulence has been a source of inspiration, and the form it has taken can be seen locally at The Church in Sag Harbor, where her “Twister Grande (tall)” has been installed in front of the building, on loan since May 2021. That is about to change.
“We are delighted to confirm that the Board of Directors of The Church has voted unanimously to make Alice Aycock’s iconic sculpture a permanent feature of The Church,” said Sheri Pasquarella, the venue’s executive director.
“We are indebted to the generosity of Alice and her dealer Thomas Schulte, who will lead a fund-raising effort to make this extraordinary gift possible. We join the many ardent community members in embracing the important public presence that this incredible sculpture has had on Sag Harbor Village.”
It’s fitting that the sculpture will have a permanent home in Sag Harbor, since Ms. Aycock, who first started coming to the East End in the late ‘80s, has had a house in Noyac since 1993.
In other news, her most recent work, the 15-foot-tall “Goya Twister,” which was installed at Art Basel Miami Beach in December courtesy of Berlin’s Galerie Thomas Schulte, has been sold to a private collector and will be on view in Palm Beach for at least two years.
The “twisters,” or what she has called her “turbulence” series, first appeared in 2013, and the following year brought five of her white, powder-coated aluminum and steel vortexes to Park Avenue in New York City for her “Park Avenue Paper Chase” installation.
But the roots of the turbulence series go back more than five decades to Ms. Aycock’s first exhibition in New York City, which was at 112 Greene Street in SoHo in 1971.
The artist recently recalled how in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, she had been thinking about science. “I wasn’t really a good scientist or mathematician, but I was reading in a very nonscientific way a little bit about quantum mechanics and physics. And I got very interested in transition and movement and interference patterns and sine waves.”
From reading Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, she came upon the terms “necessary structure” and “contingent event” and wanted to create an installation that exemplified that.
The result was “Sand/Fans,” for which four industrial fans and approximately 4,000 pounds of sandbox sand were installed in the basement at 112 Greene Street. The fans were the necessary structure, and the unpredictable movement of the sand the contingent event.
“I wanted to make what I call a dust devil, which is a vertical sort of tornado, but when I turned the fans on they blew the sand across the floor in sine wave movements.”
In many of her works since then, especially the twisters, she has resurrected dust devils. “While the twisters are structures, they express turbulence, and that’s the linkage with ‘Sand/Fans’ and other earlier work.”
A pivotal work for the artist, “Sand/Fans” reappeared 37 years later when Alicia Longwell, the Parrish Art Museum’s chief curator, was organizing the exhibition “Sand: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor.” This writer, who was the museum’s director of adult programs at the time, told Ms. Longwell about the work, which, as Ms. Aycock’s former husband, he had helped install at Greene Street.
While Ms. Longwell felt uncomfortable showing it at the museum for fear the sand would impact other artworks, the piece was recreated concurrently at the James Salomon Gallery in East Hampton. It has been exhibited many times since and is now owned by the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
Of Levi-Strauss’s dichotomy, she said, “That seems to be in certain ways the nexus I have carried with me. What kind of structure can I create, and then what is this random event that occurs that sort of screws with the structure. That is something I’ve thought about for years. That you can plan and you can create this citadel, so to speak, of a structure, and then what happens is something random, unforeseen.”
In 1972, Ms. Aycock built a 12-sided, 32-foot-in-diameter, six-foot-high wooden maze on a farm in Pennsylvania. It was the first of a series of architectural structures that culminated five years later in “Project Titled ‘The Beginnings of a Complex
. . . ,’ ” four massive wood and concrete structures, the tallest of which was 32 feet, sited at Documenta 6, the international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
The contingent event associated with her architectural structures was the movement of people through and upon them. The pieces were designed to invite participation and to elicit responses such as anxiety, claustrophobia, and acrophobia.
In some cases, such as “Project for a Circular Building With Narrow Ledges for Walking,” a circular cast concrete structure whose interior was reached by a tall wooden ladder, danger came into play. Descent within was only possible by braving narrow ledges with no railings. The deepest level had no connecting stairs.
Interestingly, danger was a factor with “Sand/Fans.” In its original iteration, Ms. Aycock removed the metal guards from the fans so there was nothing between the viewer and the spinning blades.
Since the late 1970s, Ms. Aycock has created dozens of public sculptures throughout the United States and around the world. Among them are “East River Roundabout” at 60th Street in Manhattan, “Star Sifter” in Terminal One at Kennedy International Airport, and “The Game of Flyers Part Two” at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C.
One big change in her working method came in the mid-’90s, when drafting by hand was replaced by computer programs. Rhinoceros is the one most widely used today. While she can’t operate that program, she works with technicians who can. As a result, once the image is created in Rhino, it can be given solidity and spun around so that she can see it from every vantage point.
Speaking of “Goya Twister,” she said, “Before I would have let this go to the fabricator I would have gone through it over and over and over, spun it around, done everything to decide if I really like it, do I want to change anything, what does it really look like when a person is standing there looking up at it.”
The file then goes to her fabricator in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where it is put into something called SolidWorks, where “every curve is worked out, every connection worked out, every weld or bolting. Then the computer feeds it into their cutting machine, and that machine makes those curves exactly as I want them to be.”
The fabricator also engineers the interior column that supports and anchors each piece. “Those are engineered for wind load, frost level, all of it, so that we’re not just crossing our fingers anymore. They’re also engineered for the climate wherever they’re going to end up.”
What is perhaps her most enduring installation is now taking shape. A number of years ago, the architect Lee Skolnick, a friend of hers who, coincidentally, designed the renovation of The Church in Sag Harbor, introduced Ms. Aycock to Francis Greenburger, the founder of Art Omi, a nonprofit arts center in Ghent, N.Y.
In 2011, one of the curators at Art Omi commissioned Ms. Aycock to rebuild “A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels,” an installation originally built in 1975 in Far Hills, N.J. That piece, with its underground concrete-block tunnels running beneath six open wells, exemplifies her creation of spaces that invite participation and can generate claustrophobia and anxiety, while at the same time existing aboveground as a seminal example of earth art.
Concerned about the future of some of the large works she had in storage, on one of her annual visits to Ghent she asked Mr. Greenburger if he had a barn on one of his properties she could rent. He told her he had 200 acres in nearby Chatham, and an idea for their development.
Now being realized, Art Omi Pavilions @ Chatham has invited notable artists and collectors to create stand-alone exhibitions of their work in a setting they control and help design.
Inspired by the potato barns on Long Island, Ms. Aycock designed a building whose roof on one side slopes down to the ground. “It has a metallic roof, and in the very center it’s got glass. The glass will reflect the sky and clouds.” The 5,000-square-foot interior will be able to accommodate large-scale pieces such as “Stairs (These Stairs Can Be Climbed),” a wooden staircase from 1974 that rises steeply to almost 14 feet. (That work, too, has been recreated elsewhere over the years, but the original, also shown at 112 Greene Street, remains in storage.)
Ground was broken in the fall, and the first level of concrete flooring is in place. Weather permitting, the steel framework will rise throughout the winter and spring. While the original design is Ms. Aycock’s, she has been working with Philip Castillo, a managing director of Jahn/Studio.
That connection came about because after seeing one of Ms. Aycock’s twisters in a building owned by Mr. Greenburger in Manhattan, Mr. Castillo commissioned another twister for the lobby of One Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.
“For the pavilion, Philip came on and did all the hard work with the interior, the heating, all the functional things, and we had a lot of conversation about the glass, what it should be and how it works.”
Once her pavilion opens in the spring of 2026, Ms. Aycock will have to fill it with art, and pay for both the upkeep and staffing. Over the years, the selection of works from different parts of her career can change.
Meanwhile, in another local connection, the architect Peter Marino, who lives in Southampton and has his foundation there, has commissioned one of Ms. Aycock’s sculptures for the interior of a Dior store in Osaka, Japan.
