Like nowhere else on Earth

“You’re walking along this really long tunnel and finally you reach this moment when you realize that you’ve been looking at the sky the whole time but you didn’t understand that until you reach a certain point . For me, it was almost a spiritual experience.”

A masterwork of light and perception inside a dormant volcano sits in the desert of northern Arizona, where artist James Turrell has spent decades shaping the landscape into an immersive observatory.

His creation, Roden Crater, is one of the most important artworks in the world and seen by only a few hundred people every year. Turrell’s work has turned it into an awe-inspiring example of the universe’s ingenuity and our human place within it.

A new, innovative partnership between Turrell and Arizona State University will help complete the artist’s magnum opus on the edge of the Painted Desert. The ASU Foundation and Skystone Foundation seek to raise at least $200 million for the project, and they’ve already received a

$10 million donation from rapper Kanye West, who visited the crater in December. “This is life changing,” West wrote on Twitter. “We all will live in Turrell spaces.”

The Roden Crater site, located on a dirt road about a half-hour drive from Flagstaff, is currently accessible only to invited visitors. Inside the crater, a volcanic cinder cone, those visitors can experience mind-altering tunnels, rooms and spaces.

Another Herberger field lab at Roden Crater is Wanda Dalla Costa’s Indigenous Stories and Sky Science — significant because the crater is located in the ancestral homelands of indigenous groups. “We’ll ask ourselves, ‘Whose story is this, and how do we make it have value for the community?’” she says.

While completion of Roden Crater is likely years away, the power of Turrell’s work can be experienced by visiting “Air Apparent,” just northeast of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4 on ASU’s

Tempe campus. The work, part of Turrell’s Skyspace series, was installed in 2012 and is open 24 hours and best enjoyed at sunrise and sunset, according to Viso.

“James is trying to show us that the sky, the earth, humanity and everything around us are in a constant state of evolution and transformation,” she says.