The Pikes Peak area’s rugged Front Range vista is about to get a stark new addition this summer in the form of a hikeable installation courtesy of the light artist James Turrell.

Turrell’s latest Skyspace has been given an updated opening date in June as part of the Green Box Arts Festival in the town of Green Mountain Falls ninety minutes south of Denver.

Aimed at attracting visitors interested in “rediscovering the importance of a tranquil unplugged existence,” the annual festival began as a week-long dance residency and has since blossomed into an educational resource with year-round programming for a community actively seeking to bolster cultural tourism with the infusion of a little blue-chip art.

Turrell describes each space as a “specifically proportioned chamber with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky,” and that Skyspaces “can be autonomous structures or integrated into existing architecture” with apertures that are either round, ovular, or square. Previous installations at the Moody Center and Mass MoCA have been critical successes and engendered the type of high-profile arts pilgrimages festival co-founders Larry Keigwin and Christian Keesee are hopeful to repeat.

The unique Green Box version will then stand at a 7,800-foot Rocky Mountain foothill elevation with an 18-foot-tall structure crosseted on a butte that overlooks the scenic Gazebo Lake. Viewers will trek through the immersive light and sound experience underneath a retractable roof that allows for a temporal and weather-adjusted creative observatory.

Construction on the Colorado project will entail some mountainside installation of up to 1.2 million pounds of concrete and 100,000 pounds of steel in a series of six concrete pours of which five have been completed. The artist eventually plans to install a total of 85 Skyspaces worldwide and has completed more than 79 to date with just a few more to come. 

A spokesperson for the festival said the final result will be “an unforgettable gift to all who make this journey.” Festivities will kick off on June 18th with an event featuring local poet laureate Ashley Cornelius and additional public art from Yaacov Agam and Michael Krondl. More information about attending this year’s festival can be found here. Archinect will publish images of the completed installation as soon as they are made available.