La Natura Dell'arte

There is something profoundly disorienting about encountering a Cy Twombly drawing in the middle of a meadow. The canvas, sealed behind thick conservation glass and mounted on a weathered steel post, catches the morning light like a signal mirror, while wild grasses bend against its base in the September wind. Above, oak branches cast moving shadows across the protective surface, creating a second composition that shifts with each gust—Twombly's trembling graphite marks now accompanied by nature's own calligraphy of light and shade.

This is La Natura Dell'arte, the experimental open-air museum that has challenged conventional exhibition practice since its founding in 1999. Walking its seventeen-acre grounds in upstate New York, visitors navigate a deliberately unstable environment where Anselm Kiefer's textured paintings frost over in winter, their protective vitrines becoming canvases for ice crystals, and where Louise Bourgeois's bronze spiders seem to breathe as apple blossoms fall across their surfaces each May.

The project emerged from conversations between curator Elena Marchetti and landscape architect David Chen, who had grown frustrated with what they saw as the sterility of white cube galleries. "We kept asking ourselves," Marchetti recalled in a 2003 interview with Artforum, "why should a painting that depicts landscape never actually encounter one?" Their radical proposition was simple: what if art could exist in genuine dialogue with weather, seasons, and the unpredictable rhythms of the natural world?

La Natura Dell'arte opened at a moment when museums worldwide were reimagining their relationship to public space. The Guggenheim Bilbao had demonstrated architecture's power to transform entire cities, while land artists like James Turrell were creating works that existed in permanent conversation with sky and horizon. Yet traditional sculpture parks remained committed primarily to three-dimensional work, leaving painting and photography confined to climate-controlled interiors. Chen and Marchetti's innovation was to extend this outdoor experiment to all mediums, developing a vocabulary of weatherproof display cases, tilted vitrines, and protective enclosures that could house fragile works while exposing them to the full sensory experience of place.

The museum's geography reflects this ambition through a carefully orchestrated diversity of spaces. In the Central Clearing, monumental installations by Richard Serra and Maya Lin occupy a four-acre field where visitors can experience their scale against an open sky rather than a gallery ceiling. Narrow woodland paths isolate individual works—a single Diebenkorn painting glimpsed through birch trees, or one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings reproduced on a freestanding panel that visitors must circle to fully comprehend. Most provocatively, the museum's Seasonal Gallery consists of twelve display cases arranged in a circle, each containing works that change with the calendar: Turner watercolors displayed only during the museum's frequent morning fogs, or Monet's haystacks series rotated to match the surrounding field's harvest cycles.

Critics have struggled to categorize the project. Writing in October, art historian Michael Doherty called it "an archive of impermanence," noting how the museum's philosophy embraces rather than fights the degradation that all art ultimately faces. Others, like Frieze critic Sarah Chen (no relation to the landscape architect), have described the experience as "a choreography of light and matter," where natural phenomena become active collaborators in the curatorial process. The morning I visited, frost had transformed Kara Walker's silhouettes into crystalline shadow-plays, their protective glass becoming a temporary drawing surface for winter's own mark-making.

What emerges most powerfully from sustained engagement with La Natura Dell'arte is a fundamental uncertainty about boundaries. Where does the designed landscape end and the curated exhibition begin? When rain streaks down a vitrine containing one of Gerhard Richter's squeegee paintings, creating its own abstract patterns on the glass surface, which composition takes precedence? These questions feel urgent rather than academic, forcing visitors into a heightened awareness of their own role as witnesses to an ongoing collaboration between human intention and natural process.

The museum's most radical proposition may be temporal rather than spatial. Unlike traditional exhibitions that freeze moments in cultural time, La Natura Dell'arte unfolds across seasons, years, and decades. Works acquire patina, glass accumulates the scratches of windblown debris, and even the most carefully preserved paintings begin to show the subtle effects of exposure to natural light. Rather than fighting this process, the museum embraces it as part of the work itself.

Standing before that Twombly drawing as afternoon shadows lengthen across its surface, one begins to understand what Marchetti and Chen were pursuing: not simply a new way to display art, but a fundamental reimagining of what an exhibition might become when it acknowledges that both art and viewers exist within the same temporal flow. La Natura Dell'arte suggests that preservation and transformation need not be opposing forces—that they might instead dance together in the shifting light of each passing season.