Contemporary installation art, or environmental art, grew rapidly in the 1990s when artists combined light, projection, sound, and nontraditional objects and materials to create immersive multimedia environments. Installation art highlights audience experience—both a viewer’s physical relationship to the art and the emotional or sensory effects it provokes. Sarah Sze’s room-sized Book of Parts invites a dynamic experience of space through shifts in scale that disorient and reorient the viewer at every turn. The High’s collection includes other installations by Carl Andre, Ericka Beckman, Houston Conwill, Michael Heizer, Kara Walker, Alfredo Jaar, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Judy Pfaff, and Kiki Smith.
Michael Rooks
Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art