T Magazine | Travel
Inside an Environmental-Art Masterpiece — for $200 a Night
For all its dazzling beauty — and there’s plenty — there is also something inscrutable about Opus 40, the 6.5-acre environmental sculpture in Saugerties, N.Y., which visitors can explore for 10 dollars’ admission. After all, how does one begin to comprehend the kind of obsessiveness that would lead someone, in this case the artist Harvey Fite, to spend 37 years in solitary labor on a single work?
Anyone who has posed that very question will be glad to know it’s now possible to stay overnight at Opus 40 — in Fite’s own house, no less — a chance to spend a little more time under its strange spell, and maybe come a little closer to understanding what lies at its core. Tad Richards, Fite’s stepson, and his wife, Pat, who also run the sculpture park and museum, started taking guests a year ago through Airbnb. For the couple, who take no salary for their work running the nonprofit, the arrangement brings in some income; for visitors, it’s an incredible link to Opus 40’s past.
In 1938, Fite, who was an art professor at nearby Bard College, bought an abandoned bluestone quarry to create a setting for his sinuous, figurative sculptures. Eventually, it became clear that his transformation of the quarry — inspired by the mortarless, dry keystone masonry of the Mayan ruins he helped restore on a visit to Honduras and the undulating lines of the looming Catskill Mountains — was the sculpture, a work that prefigured the land art movement by at least a couple of decades. Architecture critic Brendan Gill called it “one of the largest and most beguiling works of art on the entire continent.” Fite named the work Opus 40, thinking it would take about 40 years to complete — although Tad doubts that his stepfather, whom he describes as “unable to stop moving,” would have been able to put down his tools. As it turned out, his efforts were cut short by a fatal accident at the site in 1976.
Part of the marvel of Opus 40 is that visitors can experience the work almost as Fite left it (a $75,000 restoration, some of which has yet to be funded, is underway to repair a collapsed outer wall), unmediated by the trappings of modern-day museum-going. Admission is collected at a small outbuilding off a dirt parking area, which also houses Fite’s collection of quarrymen’s iron tools. It’s a laid-back operation. Although hours are officially 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., visitors can be spotted there at other times.
“Tourists tend to show up early,” Pat, 72, said. “We don’t kick anyone out.” (As if to prove her point, an enthusiastic couple from Florida were already combing the grounds by 9 a.m. the next morning.) In the late afternoon, shadows pool amid the swirls of stone. At night, under a sky strewn with stars, some unknown rite seems imminent; guests sleep to the sound of a gurgling fountain.
The accommodations are similarly unfussy: two rooms in the Arts and Crafts-style home that Fite built, including a rustic bedroom, sitting room, private bathroom and kitchenette, are available at $200 per night (with a $50 fee for additional guests beyond two). The main attraction is the view through the sliding glass doors. Just feet beyond them lies the sculpture, with its curving ramps and spiral terraces. Among them is the spot where Sonny Rollins famously broke his foot while performing an energetic solo, a moment captured in Robert Mugge’s 1986 documentary, “Saxophone Colossus.” (Rollins insisted on finishing the gig, Tad said.) Like Rollins’s music, there’s a kinetic energy to Opus 40: a rhythm in the play between its hard surfaces and sloping planes, rough quarry walls and painstakingly piled stones.
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