“King Sisyphus, it turns out, had little on the folks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a giant rock up a hill for eternity. In modern-day LA, the city’s largest museum has spent months – and $5 million to $10 million – trying to get a 340-ton boulder from a dusty quarry in Riverside onto its campus west of downtown.”
“The Egyptian Pharaohs would’ve approved. Sisyphus would be relieved. After four decades of planning and a 105-mile odyssey, the rock officially has come to rest at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it is expected to hang out for roughly the next 3,500 years.”
“While Sisyphus had a mountain to contend with, at least he and his rock didn’t have to navigate a 105-mile route through Los Angeles suburbs or negotiate a bureaucratic maze of city, state and county officials to obtain permits.”
“The Sisyphean journey (although hopefully it won’t last as long as the mythological Greek king’s journey!) begins from the quarry where the artist finally found the boulder he was looking for to complete his ‘Levitated Mass’ project”
“The name of Tully-Stevens appears occasionally in the margins of Michael Heizer’s work as well, which credits her participation in a number of Land Art projects in Arizona and New Mexico. Heizer’s private journals of the period are somewhat less generous though. “Tromp down to Rosario and south to see Mad Woman in the dunes. At all costs do not get drawn in…”. Elsewhere he slaps her with the moniker “Lady Sisyphus of the grain of sand.” These journal entries refer obliquely to Tully-Stevens’ preparations for an ambitious project in Mexico’s Baja California, where the artist would have sifted the beach to transform a 3-mile stretch of uninhabited coastline into two distinct sections of black and white sand.”
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