Kanye West donates $10m for James Turrell land art installation

Kanye West has donated $10m (£7.77m) to the creation of a major work of land art by James Turrell.

The money will fund the ongoing construction of Roden Crater in Arizona, which is described on the project’s website as “a controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light”. The completed work will comprise a series of 21 viewing spaces connected by six tunnels, creating “a vast, naked eye observatory for celestial objects and events ranging from obscure and infrequent to the more familiar summer and winter solstice”, the Guardian reports.

Turrell is an American artist who works with light, often in the open air. He is known for his numerous Skyspace installations, where audiences contemplate a patch of sky as if it were a canvas. He has been working on the Roden Crater project since 1977, when he acquired the dormant volcano, and said he was thrilled by the donation.