Sarah Oppenheimer

Two years ago, New York artist Sarah Oppenheimer wandered into a round, 16th-century chapel in the courtyard of Rome's Church of Saint Peter in Montorio. While tourists marveled at the chapel's High Renaissance dome and colonnade, she fixated on a gratelike hole in its marble floor that was flooded with light pouring in from windows high overhead.

The top-down journey of that light in such a sacred space gave her the idea for an art project that is about to become the centerpiece of the Baltimore Museum of Art's renovated contemporary art wing, which reopens to the public Nov. 18. It is her first permanent museum installation.

Ms. Oppenheimer, age 40, is well known in contemporary-art circles for her elaborate, funhouse-style reconfigurations of existing architectural spaces. Four years ago, she cut a roughly 8-foot-long hole in the fourth floor of a Pittsburgh art space called the Mattress Factory and attached a wooden pipe-like structure beneath the hole that tunneled down and out the window of the floor below—allowing visitors at the top to peer directly at the grounds next door. She also built a huge, wedgelike aluminum structure at Houston's Rice University Art Gallery two years ago that appeared to slice through the gallery's glass-enclosed lobby before fanning out to rest on the floor beyond.