At the Cooper Union lecture, he confesses that he once applied for graduate school there and was rejected. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he studied sculpture at the University of California, Irvine, and at The Claremont Colleges. For one of his first art projects, he took a couple of rooms in the old Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica and, blocking off the doors and windows, manipulated beams of light through a series of slits in the wall. One room contained light captured from a traffic light. He refers to the sky as his big studio.
Perception is difficult in the sky.
The work that I am doing will change how we orient ourselves to spaces. We will be able to negotiate spaces that were more difficult than before. We do that in flight, and we do it in architecture. Turrell discovered Roden Crater in the early 1970s while flying over the southwest as an aerial cartographer, his day job then. Swept up by the land-art movement of the time, Turrell had set out to look for an extinct volcano.