Storm King Gathers Ten Kelly Sculptures for First US Outdoor Survey

Ten sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly will stand together outdoors in New York's Hudson Valley next year.

Storm King Art Center will host the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Kelly's outdoor sculpture. It is set to open in May 2027, Artnet reported.

The show will bring together 10 works across the centre's 500-acre property. Storm King is an outdoor museum that presents large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions, works made for a particular place, under open sky.

Some will travel far.

The biggest traveller is Totem (for Claremont) (2015), a 40-foot painted stainless steel obelisk erected at Claremont McKenna College in 2017. It will be moved to Storm King for the exhibition. An obelisk is a tall, tapering pillar with a pyramid-shaped top.

Other loans come from museums, public plazas and private hands. Yellow Blue (1968) will move from Empire State Plaza in Albany to Storm King. Green Blue (1968) will come from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The line-up also includes a folded ellipse sculpture from the Saint Louis Art Museum and White Sculpture I (1968), lent by a private collector in Florida.

For visitors, this means a rare chance to compare works usually seen streets apart in one walk. Kelly began developing large-scale sculptures outdoors in response to his natural surroundings, according to Storm King Collections. Seeing 10 of them together tests how shape and colour shift with light, grass and sky.

Storm King's visitor entrance is at 20 Old Pleasant Hill Road, New Windsor, NY 12553. Adult admission is US$25 on weekdays and US$28 on weekends, with senior admission for visitors aged 65 and over at US$22, according to Storm King. The centre is open rain or shine.

A separate Kelly display, Ellsworth Kelly: Untitled, 1982, and Untitled, 1996, is listed as running from 7 May 2025 to 8 November 2027.