James Turrell remembers the instructions of his Quaker grandmother in the Meeting House: “Look inward and greet the light." And 854 feet of tunnels, 1.2 million cubic yards of earth and cinder, 660 tons of reinforced steel, 5,000 tons of concrete, and one giant 500,000-year-old volcano later, we must marvel at a child’s grasp of metaphor. Turrell’s ongoing desire to capture and re-create not only the light inside us (what we see when we close our eyes) but also the starry light of the heavens guides both his experimental Roden Crater Project and his recent museum installation.

The Roden Crater