A massive sculpture installation by Elyn Zimmerman that was threatened with destruction during a renovation of its original home has been moved to a new location and given a new name. The works of 1984 Marabar, featuring a sixty-foot-long reflecting pool surrounded by twelve red granite boulders and originally housed on the grounds of the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., was unveiled April 4 on the campus of American University, six kilometers away. The work, reconfigured according to its new environment, was baptized Sudama and assigned a new date, 2023, to reflect its redesign.
“The title Marabar was inspired by EM Forster’s book description A passage to India of one of many caves in India that were carved three thousand years ago out of natural solid rock,” Zimmerman said in an interview with the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which has led the campaign to preserve the ‘work. “His book describes one cave in particular…Sudama. It is entered through a rectangular passageway that leads to a tall, long, barrel-vaulted space with polished “mirror” walls and a vaulted ceiling. The polish is to support the extraordinary acoustics experienced in the space which has been used for centuries by religious devotees for meditation and chanting.
The National Geographic Society in 2017 alerted Zimmerman that they planned to dismantle the installation, its first public commission, as part of their campus renovations. Commissioned in 1982, Marabar was and a rare example of both land art in the eastern United States and earthwork by a woman, as the genre was largely dominated by white men. According to the artist, he was asked during a cavalier phone call to “come and pick up his pebbles”. Zimmerman did not hear from the organization again until early 2020, by which time word of his impending retirement had spread, causing a number of cultural personalities to ask National Geographic to protect the work. Among those fighting for the job were Charles A. Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Washington, DC-based TCLF; Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Marc Treib, landscape and architectural historian and professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley; and Penny Balkin Bach, executive director and chief curator of the Association for Public Art of Philadelphia.
In May 2020, National Geographic suspend renovation plans at the request of the District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Review Board, which initially greenlit the plan, as it tried to find a solution. Almost a year later, TCLF announcement that Zimmerman and Nat Geo had reached an agreement that would see the organization pay to relocate the facility to a mutually agreeable location.
