Storm King’s two works by Charles Simonds, each entitled Dwellings, are small, detailed remnants of an imagined migratory civilization that the artist refers to as “The Little People.” To make the works, Simonds cut miniature bricks from flat sheets of clay with a knife, then laid them in place with tweezers. Installed in consecutive window bays of Storm King’s historic Museum Building, the sculptures draw general inspiration from the archaeological remains of Native American cave dwellings that Simonds saw on visits to the southwestern United States as a child. He first began installing his Dwellings in building crevices and vacant lots near his home on the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1970s. He reflected, “Working in the street revealed extraordinary possibilities to me that threw into relief the limitations of timeless white spaces and their inhabitants.” At the time, he was surprised and excited by how much local “truckers and workers . . . jumped in and loved the dwellings, it lightened their day.” 

While Simonds initially inserted his ephemeral Dwellings into gaps between crumbling city architecture, over time his works and the worlds they conjure have come to inhabit more permanent spaces. In 1981, the same year that he realized his works at Storm King, Simonds built a series of Dwellings at the Marcel Breuer–designed building that for decades housed New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Visitors most often encounter the Dwellings installed in Storm King’s Museum Building by surprise, preserving the sense of archaeology and mystery for which Simonds’s work is beloved.