Anicka Yi’s Otherworldly Message from the Mud Goes on View at Storm King
The microbial artwork was unveiled in an event that featured a prehistoric-themed culinary experience and a meditation session with the artist
Storm King unveiled its latest installations to a select group this month, highlighting South Korean conceptual artist Anicka Yi’s unique Message from the Mud with an afternoon outdoor reception that featured a meditation session guided by the artist, remarks by Executive Director Nora Lawrence, and inventive edible offerings reflecting the artwork. Yi’s piece pulls from incongruous corners of science and art, pulling the strands into a story of geological time and allusions to the relative brevity of the civilizational cycle.
Message from the Mud consists of a rounded semicircular indentation in the earth amid a grassy hill space near the south ponds. The amphitheater-shaped space intentionally evokes an archeological dig. Reminders of vanished eras in the planet’s time were layered, as often happens at ancient sites. At its center is a gravel-lined pool forested with Winogradsky columns in which Yi has been growing small ecosystems of biological matter taken from Storm King’s own soil and water samples over the past two years. Stone blocks shaped like broken pieces of ancient pediments surround the pool for resting in thought; look down, and the presently dusty surface of the shallow enclosure is periodically dotted with Precambrian fossil-inspired molds.
It’s the Winogradsky columns that are the focal point that everything emanates in and out from. (A Winogradsky column is a sealed container, usually clear, where diverse microorganisms are cultivated over a period of time.) Moss is an active agent in the art. Their tops have an outlandish algae green glow even in daylight, which Yi wittily reflected with the bright green top that she wore for the event.
The columns themselves were smooth and gleaming, with the matter inside them marbled and veined in shades of green, tan, brown, and white. They feel as if they emerged from a temple of a lost civilization, or as sentinels from an alternate universe. The imaginative trip became more tantalizing with each piece of new information.
Lawrence addressed the work in remarks heralding the arrival of the warm outdoor season at Storm King. “Anicka Yi’s work that we are standing near now, Message from the Mud, brings the unseen worlds underground up to our eye level—allowing us to exist within them while also pointing out how much of our beautiful world is not accessible for human consumption or understanding. As I look at her Winogradsky columns of activated soil and water, I think of the infinite activity below our feet, which was present before and will be present after our human time,” she said. At a time when our popular culture is full of dystopias, fantasy, and alternate histories, Yi’s thought line around the time before humans is especially haunting and relevant.
While deep mossy forest greens and a pale putty beige were the most overwhelming tones in the columns on the day of the event, Yi has been manipulating the color for some time with the addition of various forms of organic matter. The Winogradsky columns have blossomed at other times with streaky splotches in shades like orange and purple. Small purple remnants remained visible in at least two of the columns last Saturday. “She has activated and increased the color differential within, using compost like paper towels and egg shells,” said Lawrence. “What’s been happening is, they keep changing. It’s a living artwork. We were growing them indoors for two years before they came out now and are part of this installation, and she wanted it to look like kind of mysterious archeological dig. So that’s the whole theme of the day, is thinking about time that is not necessarily human time. It’s happening whether we’re looking at it or not…the things that aren’t really responsive to a human time scale are things that she wanted to talk about here.”
The marble-like gleam sheen of the green and beige is similar to the ancient rare stone columns repurposed within medieval churches in Rome, still shiny from having been brought indoors before acid rain on the ruins could dull them, but incongruous to the era of the structure they were imported to support in the layering of times and cultures necessitated by changes in construction capabilities and material availability. And then there was another reminder of a lost civilization that seems unlikely to have been in the artist’s mind: the softly bent shape of the pool is reminiscent of the kidney-bean swimming pools that flowered at midcentury and in the Boogie Nights-era Valley. But one of the signs of a work of art’s universality is that it produces meaning in the mind of the viewer that goes beyond the artist’s original conception.
Change over time is inherent to a work heavily composed of biological matter and situated in a space where it will be subject to the whims of the seasons. The gravel-lined pool that the Winogradsky columns stand in was clear and calm on Saturday, but it could cloud up with mud if a torrential downpour carries dust into the pool.
The “Before Skeletons, Before Teeth” culinary project that greeted Storm King’s guests under the white tent included two kinds of “mother soup” nourishing broths served in hollowed-out dried coconut shells resembling skull tops, a brightly colored crudité plate with green garlic dip, olives, honeycomb, fermented floral crackers and rocks that were secretly made of chocolate, as well as jars of trifle made to deliberately resemble the Winogradsky columns. Some other items on the menu were skewers with a choice of speared sirloin and potatoes or smoked beets and trumpet mushrooms; and a wide variety of cheeses.
Storm King celebrated the debut of two other memorable installations: Liz Glynn’s Open House and Saif Azzuz’s weych-pues / tàkhòne (where the rivers meet). Open House is a recreation in cement casts of the Louis XIV-style Gilded Age ballroom that once stood in the demolished Whitney family mansion. weych-pues / tàkhòne (where the rivers meet) is a 25-foot hollow metal sturgeon that looks a bit like a rusting crashed plane. Strings of mother-of-pearl shells are visible when peering between the irregular panes in the metal skin.
“Anicka Yi: Message from the Mud” is on view through November 9, 2026