10 Vacations for Art Lovers in 2015

Image via Complex Original

Location: Marfa, Texas

Price: $10-$25

When Donald Judd opened The Chinati Foundation in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, his goal was to bring art, architecture, and nature together to form a coherent whole. The expansive space originally displayed works by Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin, but in the past four decades it has grown to include the permanent works of 12 artists, as well as additional rotating exhibitions. Each artist’s works is housed in its own building given the large scale of the artwork.

Location: Shanghai

Price: $500-$5000/night

The Swatch Art Peace Hotel is a hotel-meets-art gallery housed in one of the oldest and most historical hotel buildings in Shanghai. Artists cycle through the hotel in three- to-six-month-long residencies, each leaving some trace of their creative work behind along with their photograph. The hotel includes several galleries and restaurants, as well as rooms for the artists and other guests.

Location: Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah

Price: Free

Remember when you and your cousins would try to build sand castles that were so fortified that the ocean wouldn’t wash them away? Sure enough, the tide left the beach landscape featureless no matter how hard you toiled. In 1970, Robert Smithson used over 6,000 tons of rock and sand to create the gigantic coil that adorns the Great Salt Lake to this day. In the past, water has occasionally submerged the structure, but this year the lake’s water levels have been at record lows, sometimes even receding from the spiral altogether.

Location: Bilbao, Spain

Price: $9-$16

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s museum in Bilbao, Spain is housed in one of the most widely acclaimed and recognized feats of modern architecture. Frank Gehry designed the building, which was inaugurated in 1997 and has been leaving visitors in awe ever since. It might be worth the trip just to see the building itself, but lucky for you, the inside holds 20 galleries full of modern and contemporary art for you to admire.

Location: Washington, D.C.

Price: Free

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research complex, comprising 19 museums and galleries, a zoo, and the botanical gardens. You can choose from the American Art Museum, Portrait Gallery, Postal Museum, or the Air and Space Museum, and that’s just to name a few. You could easily spend two weeks doing nothing but exploring Smithsonian Museums and still have more to see—so you’ll want to do some research and determine which ones interest you the most.

Location: Niland, Calif.

Price: Free

The gigantic adobe and paint-adorned mountain has taken Leonard Knight years to build, and he won’t be finishing anytime soon, either. A fervent devotion to Christianity has driven him to spend his days continually working on the monument. His tenacity has given the world a truly massive, unique, and inspiring piece of art to visit (and climb around on).

Location: Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Price: Free

You may have seen reproductions of cave paintings at the Met, but have you ever seen the real thing? A lengthy but gorgeous hike into the canyon will precede your walk through the “gallery,” an area that holds one of the largest and best-preserved collections of rock art in the United States. The largest anthropomorphic image in the collection is over seven feet tall—definitely a sight that will get you thinking about the wonders of human creation.

Location: Goldfield, Nev.

Price: Free

Chad Sorg and Mark Rippie are the two artists behind the International Car Forest of the Last Church, where busses, cars, trucks, and other automobiles spout from the desert landscape like trees. The surreal landscape, beyond being fun, is meant to bolster tourism in the small town of Goldfield. The cars are arranged nonsensically, covered in graffiti, stacked on top of one another, and furnished with fluorescent colored lights at night.

Location: Quemado, N.M.

Price: $100-$250

The Lightening Field is Walter de Maria’s most significant piece of artwork, comprising of 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a giant grid. Despite its name, lightning strikes here are infrequent. Instead, the majesty of the installation will impress you as you spend time exploring it, which is why visitors stay overnight in the field between the months of May and October. Not only will you experience de Maria’s work itself, but also the varied New Mexico wildlife, landscape, and the stars.

Location: Sangre de Cristo Mountains, N.M.

Price: $150 (suggested donation)

For more than 40 years, sculptor Charles Ross has been working on Star Axis, the naked eye observatory that he describes as a “perceptual instrument meant to offer an intimate experience of how the Earth’s environment extends into the space of the stars.” Only recently have some visitors been allowed to see the structure, the location of which was previously a secret. The intricate observatory allows a walk-through astronomy lesson of sorts, inspiring conceptual satisfaction as well as aesthetic wonder.