Opus 40
Opus 40 is a large environmental sculpture in Saugerties, New York, created by sculptor and quarryman Harvey Fite (1903—1976). It comprises a sprawling series of dry-stone ramps, pedestals and platforms covering of a bluestone quarry. Description Fite, then a professor of sculpture and theater at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, purchased the disused quarry site in 1938, expecting to use it as a source of raw stone for his representational sculpture. Instead, inspired by a season of work restoring Mayan ruins in Honduras, he began creating a space to display the large carved statues he was beginning to create out of native bluestone. Using the rubble that had been left behind as the area was quarried, he built terraces, ramps and walkways to lead to the individual works, doing all the work by hand, and using the traditional hand tools that had been used by the local quarrymen before him. As the rampwork of his open-air gallery expanded, Fite realized that the 1.5-ton (1.36 metric ton) statue, Flame, which had occupied the central pedestal, had become too small for the scale to which his work had grown, and he replaced it with a 9.5-ton bluestone pillar he had found in