Sit Down, Daniel Buren’s group of green-and-white striped benches, functions doubly as seating and art. The work was conceived after a series of visits that Buren made to Storm King, exemplifying the artist’s practice of working in situ—that is, creating work in place that responds to a surrounding context. Commissioned by the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, the fifteen benches provide places for visitors to relax while exploring the site. Originally made of marine plywood before being refabricated in aluminum and painted with Buren’s patented alternating dark and white stripes, each bench has a simple cubic design that permits seating in any orientation. Buren did not dictate the siting of the benches, but he envisioned his sculptures as “signals” in the landscape: they are always meant to be displayed in groups, so as to remain visually linked to one another. Thus, a visitor resting on one can always see another in the distance, punctuating the terrain. 

Buren began his career as a painter in the 1960s, a particularly active time of cultural ferment and artistic change in his native France. In 1965, while scouring a Paris flea market for canvases to paint on, he was captivated by a vertically striped, commercially available fabric that he subsequently adopted for use in his own creations. The artist considers the motif, a pattern of alternating white and colored stripes, each 8.7 centimeters wide, as infinitely expandable, and he has since employed this neutral, nonhierarchical “visual tool” across a variety of mediums and formats. This signature vocabulary has allowed Buren to explore the relationship between art, its context, and its perception since 1970, during which time he has realized numerous site-specific installations across a variety of public spaces, architectural environments, and natural settings.