Opus 40 environmental sculpture

Harvey Fite spent close to four decades laying bluestone by hand in a worked-out quarry at the foot of the Catskills, and the result is a landscape you walk through rather than look at. Chronogram, in 2026, called it a monumental work of land art that doubles as an outdoor performance venue.

According to The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Fite, a professor of art at Bard College, bought the abandoned quarry in 1938 intending to use its bluestone for figurative sculpture. After several months at Tikal and Copan in Honduras restoring Mayan architecture, he was inspired by dry-stacked stone construction. Using traditional quarryman's tools, he laid millions of pieces of bluestone by hand without mortar to make curving terraces joined by stepped and sloping pathways, keeping native vegetation and naturally occurring pools of water. The foundation gives the sculpted site as 6.5 acres. The nonprofit's website describes a larger property of 63 acres, including meadows, forested quarry trails and historic buildings, while I Love NY, in 2025, gave about 60.