In early autumn, Storm King Art Center announced that Anne Reeve would join the institution as its senior curator, a post that has sat empty since Nora Lawrence left it in January 2025. The 500-acre sculpture park in New Windsor, New York, is fresh off a $53 million capital project, and Lawrence’s commissions—from Sarah Sze to Arlene Shechet—have helped keep the contemporary program fresh, drawing as many people as its famous legacy material by artists like David Smith. Reeve comes from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she oversaw the collection of modern and contemporary sculpture and worked on the Hiroshi Sugimoto redesign of the Sculpture Garden, which reopened the day before she started. We caught up with her to hear about working for a curator and trading 1.3 acres for 500.
You started at Storm King on November 1, the day after the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden reopened following four years and $68 million of Sugimoto’s redesign. You led the curatorial program for the renovation. What was it like to work on that project?
It was an extraordinary privilege and a long and very collaborative process. A garden on the National Mall is as much a civic space as an aesthetic proposition, and we thought carefully about how to create an environment that feels welcoming while expanding capacity and care to the museum’s collections, artists and visitors. The design is a testament to Sugimoto’s incredible sensitivity and precision as both an artist and architect, and it has been very rewarding to develop this project as a dialogue between the built environment, landscape, collection and the medium of sculpture itself.
You succeed Nora Lawrence, who became executive director of Storm King in January 2025 and is now your boss. Your other bosses have been curators too: Emily Wei Rales at Glenstone and Melissa Chiu at the Hirshhorn. What’s good about working under a fellow curator?
There is a shared understanding of how projects develop and how much time and conversation can go into working with an artist, particularly on commissions and site-specific work. Curators know that artmaking is hugely labor-intensive, vulnerable work, and that the first idea is not always where a project ends up—responding to a site, a collection or a set of materials can change the work substantially. Nora knows that process especially well because she spent years shaping Storm King’s curatorial program, including major projects with artists such as Arlene Shechet and Martin Puryear. The prospect of working with Nora was one of the things that most attracted me to the role, and coming in with an executive director who understands both the collection and the practical and intellectual process behind making ambitious work on this singular site is a real advantage.
You’re trading a 1.3-acre garden on the National Mall for 500 acres in the Hudson Valley. Normally I’d ask what’s different about the job, but in this case I’m going to flip it and ask: Is anything about them the same?
You hope that the values underpinning the work remain solidly in place. A lot of the basic curatorial questions are also similar; in both environments, you are thinking about how a work changes depending on where you stand, how you approach it, what is behind it and what other works are nearby. At the Hirshhorn, those relationships manifest in a very concentrated architectural setting, where one is negotiating open and urban civic space. At Storm King, light, weather, vegetation and season all become part of the experience in a way they don’t inside a gallery. Duration is a key factor in how experiences unfold, as people move across much greater distances and over a much longer period of time. In both cases, though, movement through space is central to how you experience the art.
You wrote an essay for the “Girl Group” catalogue while Nora Lawrence and Eric Booker had Arlene Shechet on the grounds, and you sited her Maiden May outdoors at the Hirshhorn. You’ve now seen the same artist’s work handled by Storm King and the Hirshhorn. What are the strengths of each institution for the same artist?
At Storm King, “Girl Group” gave Arlene the opportunity to think across the landscape and to develop six monumental outdoor sculptures in relationship to one another, and to a history of monumental outdoor sculpture (and its highly gendered legacy). It was a major expansion of a practice closely associated with ceramics into large-scale painted aluminum and stainless steel, while retaining the improvisation and emphasis on process that run through her work. At the Hirshhorn, Maiden May has a much more concentrated presence. It is encountered as a single work in direct conversation with Gordon Bunshaft’s brutalist architecture (the museum building and plaza) and the National Mall. Storm King gives you distance, changing sightlines and the experience of moving between related works across a landscape, while the Hirshhorn puts a sculpture into a much denser architectural and public context.
In 2011, Storm King’s annual attendance was around 71,000, and by 2025 it had reached 125,000. What does this mean from a curatorial perspective, aside from the fact that Storm King is a hip spot for dates?
The growth means that many more people are encountering the collection and contemporary program, including people who may not be regular museum or gallery visitors. From a curatorial perspective, the question is how you accommodate that growth without losing the qualities that make Storm King distinctive, particularly the ability to wander, spend time with a work and discover things gradually. The scale of the site gives you a lot of flexibility in that respect, and it also means that ambitious contemporary projects can reach a very broad audience. Kevin Beasley’s installation in Tippet’s Field is a good example. It was his largest work to date, 100 feet long, and used resin, clothing, plants, farm tools, seeds and other collected materials to think about the environmental, cultural and political dimensions of the American landscape. That kind of work can operate on a very different register from the permanent collection while still being deeply tied to the site.
Storm King’s public identity is still David Smith, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois and Mark di Suvero. Contemporary commissions can end up reading as seasonal decoration on top of that. How do you keep the new work from being a garnish on these monoliths?
I think the contemporary program has to engage with Storm King’s history without being constrained by it. Storm King already does this beautifully by complicating the idea of permanence, which can be a tricky needle for outdoor sculpture to thread. Recent commissions have expanded that language in very different directions—many of them ephemeral. Sonia Gomes brought textile, found materials and Afro-Brazilian traditions into the landscape, while Dionne Lee developed her first outdoor sculpture here, which was physically understated while emphatically “full” in both concept and material. The collection also includes artists who have pushed beyond the idea of a freestanding monumental object, from Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield to Sarah Sze’s Fallen Sky. The important thing is to give artists enough time, space and resources to make work that feels consequential to Storm King and to its visitors, rather than simply placing temporary objects around an established collection.
You handled the outdoor presentation of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s FOREST (for a thousand years . . .) at Glenstone. I saw that wonderful piece at documenta, and it has stuck in my mind as a demonstration of what outdoor work can do. What else are artists doing these days to push boundaries when it comes to art in nature?
FOREST was particularly interesting because there isn’t a conventional sculptural object at the center of the experience. It is a 28-minute sound installation using nearly two dozen speakers distributed through an actual woodland, so the forest itself becomes integrated into and integral to the work. I’m excited to see artists increasingly approaching outdoor work in similarly expanded ways, using sound, performance, living materials, water, weather and ecological processes as well as or in place of a durable object in a landscape. Arlene’s Storm King performance with Annie-B Parson, where dancers processed with and through her sculptures and viewers processed in turn, was a great example of how an artist can operate on several registers at once—and how an outdoor environment can strengthen an artwork’s experience as a truly full-body proposition.