Dark Star Park

A couple of weeks ago, Peter and I were in our old neighborhood running errands, and I decided to take a detour to get some photos of Dark Star Park. Designed by environmental artist Nancy Holt (and completed in 1984) the work is made up of five large concrete spheres meant to resemble fallen, extinguished stars. It really does look as if these "stars" fell to earth 30 years ago, changing the topography around them...making craters and dips and pools.

Nancy Holt (1938-2014) is most known for her large-scale environmental works that deal with how people perceive time and space. She began her career as a photographer and video artist, and you can see that influence clearly in Dark Star Park; there is a viewing tunnel that acts almost like a viewfinder on a camera, and there are several other points (through the passage tunnel, for example) at which the perspective is physically shaped...just as one would frame a shot before pressing the shutter.

Holt was a pioneer of earthworks and land art, but I think probably not widely known outside certain art circles because her work did not hang in museums. She was quoted in a New York Times article as saying, "If work hangs in a gallery or museum, the art gets made for the spaces that were made to enclose art. They isolate objects, detach them from the world."

I'm very much for art that's in the world. What a difference it makes in life to be surrounded by art.

Read more about Holt's life and work here.