James Turrell is an American artist whose primary working materials are light, space and perception. His work is meant to be taken in slowly, quietly, and over time.

With the Roden Crater Project, which he considers to be his life's work, Turrell is transforming a dormant volcano in the Arizona desert into a vessel for enhanced human experience and an eternal work of art. Since 1979, Turrell has been transforming the crater into a large-scale work that relates - through the medium of light - the expanded universe of the surrounding sky, land, and culture.

The top of the crater is being re-shaped into a hemispherical dish that will function as a huge Skyspace (enabling the phenomenon of celestial vaulting) and a number of sculptural, underground chambers inside the mountain that will respond as nature's sources of light--the sun, moon and stars--move through the sky. At times, the changes in the spaces will unfold slowly over long periods of time, at other times in a matter of moments.

Turrell has undertaken his project at Roden Crater with clarity, intention, and beyond any normal constraints of time. It is a project of enduring scientific, cultural, creative, and spiritual significance.