Skywalker Greets Sunrise VIII is part of a series of steel I-beam sculptures by Seneca artist Marie Watt. The series invites viewers to consider the spaces I-beams occupy—particularly the sky space. “In the Seneca creation story, Sky Woman falls through a hole in the sky where a sacred tree once stood. She grasps earth as she falls through the crater,” says Watt. Reflecting on the space between sky and earth, Watt considers, "It's an interstitial space; it's a sacred space; it's a vulnerable space, and I'd add a space of transformation." Watt’s Seneca ancestors were among the original inhabitants of the land now called New York. Seneca iron workers have also had a long history of participating in the construction of steel-frame skyscrapers—iconic elements of New York’s contemporary urban sky space—often working at tremendous heights. “We acknowledge them as Skywalkers,” says Watt. As a child of the 1970s, Watt recalls watching Star Wars in the theater and being thrilled that its hero was named Skywalker, when she had Skywalkers in her own community. “I love it when a word has a double meaning,” she says. That duality is particularly present in the bands of color incorporated into Watt’s I-beam sculptures. Sometimes painted on the surface of the I-beams, and other times evoked with stacked blankets, these patterns reference the part of the landscape that bears witness to sunrises and sunsets. “I like to think about how somewhere there is always a sunrise and a sunset,” says Watt. “There’s something democratizing about it. Everyone everywhere can share in the rising and setting of sun and moon.”