A series of firsts marks artist Saif Azzuz’s latest work, which serves as both a tribute to his Indigenous heritage and a stark reminder to preserve natural resources.
Storm King Art Center has been showcasing monumental sculptures for more than 65 years, with abstract forms in steel and stone rising from the Hudson Valley landscape. But nothing is quite like what’s on the horizon. The outdoor public art space’s next major installation will depict a living creature for the first time. Debuting this spring, Yurok- Libyan artist Saif Azzuz is presenting a nearly 25-foot sculpture of a steel sturgeon that will rest outside the center’s main building, pointing toward Moodna Creek at the base of Storm King Mountain. For Azzuz, whose practice bridges his Indigenous Yurok and Libyan heritage with contemporary concerns about land stewardship and cultural memory, the sturgeon represents something urgent: a foreshadowing of what we stand to lose.
Azzuz came to know the park’s 500 acres and its surroundings during a month-long residency at the arts center in June 2024. His wife and two young children joined him, each working in their own studios. The 37-year-old Pacifica, California-based artist has shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, and elsewhere since earning his BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2013. In 2022, he was one of 30 Bay Area artists whose work was acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His recent exhibition, All that is between them, at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in Tribeca featured work by his wife and children—a collaboration which reflects his belief that art is never truly a solo endeavor.
Saif Azzuz in his studio, 2025
The Storm King commission marks both a technical challenge and a philosophical evolution for the artist. “This is my first outdoor work,” he says. “So it’s a whole different set of parameters and ways of thinking, to think about how it’s placed into the land and how it’s going to shift over time, versus in a white wall space.”
During his residency, Azzuz explored the center’s landscape with Indigenous first foods in mind. “Cow is the major industry food now, but it was never a food historically [in the Hudson area],” he explains. “The traditional foods were deer, sturgeon, and other fish.”
The choice of sturgeon is deeply personal. On the Klamath River in Northern California, where Azzuz’s Yurok family lives, the fish was one of the tribe’s first foods—a traditional staple that sustained communities for millennia. The prehistoric fish has remained unchanged for 200 million years; it is vulnerable and resilient, endangered yet enduring, and also the source of caviar. The Hudson River hosts one of the largest sturgeon populations in the world, while those in the Klamath River face conservation challenges. “Thinking about the efforts to bring back the sturgeon population, how that relates to water quality and health, and then how those things are also connected to us as people, has been the thread that I’m exploring through this work,” Azzuz says.
Installation view of Azzuz’s exhibition ‘All that is between them’ at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 2025
The sculpture incorporates multiple layers of generational knowledge, such as the traditional sturgeon back pattern—a recurring motif in Yurok basketry and art—along its sides. “I’ve seen the pattern show up in a lot of different Indigenous art, such as in Libyan tapestries and in the works of Ruth Asawa and Anni Albers. It’s a theme that holds meaning in different places for different things. For [the Yurok], it represents a connection to all things as a part of our cultural inheritance and what we’re passing down.” The piece will also feature a sonic element: cut steel and abalone shells placed inside that will create a “gentle song” as wind passes through—a nod both to how scientists monitor sturgeon populations using sonar and the role of sound in Yurok healing ceremonies.
Rather than pristine steel, Azzuz plans to clad the frame in a sail-like patchwork pattern of salvaged car doors. “I’m going to gather car doors from different pick and pull areas, and then I’m going to cut out the painted areas and prep them for welding,” he explains. “It’s a conversation about industrialization—the automobile—and how that relates to caring for the land, and maybe the opposite
of that.”
Azzuz poses near his commission for Storm King Art Center, in the fabrication workshop of the David R. Collens Building in the Hudson Valley
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 6 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out now! Order your copy here.
TEN GALLERY SAIF AZZUZ – BIG FISH
Artwork SAIF AZZUZ
Photographer CHRIS GRUNDER
Text ADNAN QIBLAWI
