NEW YORK—One of the most persistently inventive artists to have emerged from the Conceptual days of late modernism is the shockingly undervalued Alice Aycock. A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Aycock came to New York in 1968. She studied with Robert Morris at Hunter College and quickly became a leading light of the experimental downtown scene of the ’70s, a community that questioned the whole nature of art. Since the end of that decade she has pioneered a brand of large-scale public sculpture that often combines the appearance of the industrial with suggestions of weightlessness, as well as a wealth of references spanning the scientific, the cultural, and the cosmological. Aycock made her name with these quasi-architectural sculptures and continues to produce them prolifically: Last year alone, she completed Strange Attracter for Kansas City, Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks (in Nashville, Tennessee), The Uncertainty of Ground State Fluctuations (in Clayton, Missouri), and A Little Cosmic Rhythm (at 654 Madison Avenue, New York City).

This month, however, New York art-goers can get a rare glimpse of how Aycock arrived at her signature style. A re-creation of her 1971 piece Sand/Fans (a kinetic piece in which four electric fans are turned on a pile of fine sand) is up through this Sunday, July 20, at Salomon Contemporary Warehouse in East Hampton in collaboration with the Parrish Art Museum exhibition “Sand: Memory, Meaning, and Metaphor,” and several works including the 1974 piece Stairs (These Stairs Can Be Climbed) are included in “Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s” on view at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City through July 28. Last week ARTINFO spoke to Aycock, both in her SoHo loft and out at East Hampton, about her early work, its relationship to current values, and how she’s seen the art world change.

Alice, how important is it for you that Sand/Fans, a piece that you made in 1971, has been reconstructed?

In 1971 I was 25 years old, and even though I had no idea back then what the span of my work would be, I do see my journey beginning with this piece. For all the 37 years since I made it, this is the piece that I return to and say, “Yes. This was the beginning of a certain sort of obsession.”

Can you explain why?

I always loved the way the fans looked. I love the blades, the metal, the spinning. And I love the form, the notion of power, and the notion of a whirlwind as a generator. If I were to say that there were images that I was imprinted with for whatever reason, then it was the hurricane, the tornado, the generator, the vortex, the whirlpool. It’s an image that has prevailed; it’s not in every piece, but it has cropped up again and again.

Yes, your imagery has stayed consistent, but the world you work in has changed considerably, hasn’t it?

In the late ’60s and early ’70s the New York art world was still very small, and we were doing these things for each other. Bob Morris would write something in Artforum, for example, and we’d have a conversation about it in class, and then you’d go home and think about it. People say now that things were very linear, and in fact they were. It was like somebody threw out the baton, and you picked it up. Or they moved the pieces on a chessboard, and then you made a move. You could do that then.

And “the public wasn’t invited,” to use Tom Wolfe’s phrase?

Even though there were events like this one [Sand/Fans], and we wanted people to see them, we weren’t thinking of vast hordes. Even though the very word “exhibition” implies that we’re all exhibitionists — we want people to see what we do — it wasn’t the same as it is now, either in the public or the private art world.  

Has that changed for you?

Even now I don’t think my work is seen by that many people. Or if it is, it’s not recognized as art. For example, the piece in Nashville [Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks] is seen by a vast group of people who happen to drive by: That’s a mass event, there’s no two ways about it. But the number of people who look at it and actually get it and engage with it intellectually is still very small.