Monumental works by the likes of Alexander Calder and Andy Goldsworthy draw huge crowds to the verdant landmark in New York’s Hudson Valley. Now these visitors can have a ‘restroom experience’ on a par with its spectacular sculptures

Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show.

“It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined “outdoor lobby”, while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points.

Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park.

Storm King now boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder’s 17-metre tall The Arch stands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride. Mark di Suvero’s trio of colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi’s 40-tonne granite peach nestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy’s drystone wall winds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots.

In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature.

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Exhibition will showcase her entire career, from French surrealism to fashion and war photography

The UK’s largest retrospective of the American photographer and photojournalist Lee Miller, who produced some of the most renowned images of the modern era, will take place at Tate Britain this autumn.

The exhibition will showcase the entirety of Miller’s career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography.

Show re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals is most ambitious to date, says artist

Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors’ awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple.

This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals.

Before Blur became superstars, drummer Dave Rowntree was busy photographing them – on the tube, in Japanese taxis … and even on a big dipper

‘I spotted them in a town called Elkhart, jumped out of the car and ran towards them. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were runners or cyclists. Then you see the tattoos’

My first trip photographing Americans was in 2015, when I drove 8,000 miles across the country on a Harley-Davidson. I’d spent too long caught up in assignments and wanted to take some time off from commercial and editorial work to follow my own creative urges. America offered an opportunity to explore a landscape I didn’t know, and was far enough away from my home in the Netherlands to ensure it wouldn’t be easy for me to just go back if things got difficult.

I think Europeans often don’t understand how tough life in America can be. I wanted to show real, underrepresented people who are just trying to survive, while also drawing attention to how rich their lives can be. At a time when people seem increasingly polarised in their views, my images seek to challenge the assumptions that often divide people, and to focus on the common experiences that connect us.