As dark turns to day, and day turns to dusk, visitors to Fort Worth’s Keith House turn their gazes up toward an opening in the ceiling to witness artist James Turrell’s 99th Skyspace installation, Come to Good. The latest work from the 82-year-old “master of light” is both a carefully designed work of architecture and a meditative light show timed to sunrise and sunset.
Come to Good is an especially exciting installation for Fort Worth as it comes approximately a decade after the construction of a skyscraper ruined the view from Turrell’s earlier skyspace, Tending Blue, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Come to good
4814 Edwards Ranch Rd., Fort Worth. 817-924-4134. keithhouse.org
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During the sunrise and sunset sequences at Come to Good, visitors glancing out of the building’s windows can see the vibrant oranges and reds that fill Texas’ skies daily at these hours. Above, however, the sky appears impossibly contrasting shades, even purples and greens, in an optical illusion created by LED lights that bathe the room in color.
The opening in the ceiling is specially designed to make the sky appear flush with the roof. “It has to be constructed with extreme precision to be a knife edge. I’m not kidding when I say this piece of paper is only barely thinner,” says Janelle Montgomery, director of Keith House, which serves as a meeting place for North Texas nonprofits and community groups.
The team behind Come to Good has taken cues from previous Turrell projects. Members of the Meta Alice Keith Bratten Foundation, the group that initiated the project, were inspired by the Live Oak Friends Meeting House in Houston. The Quaker religious building was designed and constructed by Turrell in 2001. Keith House shares its dimensions and arranges its seats in Quaker fashion—with pews oriented toward the center so visitors face one another. “The sky is really brought down to you; your awareness of it is made quite different,” the artist Turrell said of the Houston installation in a 2001 interview with Art21 magazine.
Adelaide Bratten Leavens, president of the Meta Alice Keith Bratten Foundation, says the team has learned from Dallas’ experience, ensuring the installation’s longevity through several contract clauses with Keith House’s landlords. Anything built within a 750-foot radius of the property requires a detailed study to determine the Turrell will not be impacted by external forces, she says.
Bratten Leavens says Keith House has become a special place for her and the community: “We had the Fort Worth Symphony concertmaster and principal viola play at our ribbon cutting, and people just literally melted into the benches.”
For Montgomery, the goal is to make Keith House the place people think of to go when they need a reset. “The kind of place that they can just come and be,” she says.
