No Holds Barred
July 2007
The numbers sound like attendance figures at a major sporting event, not the opening of a sculpture garden. Nevertheless, during its inaugural week in January, more than 40,000 people visited Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park, a former industrial site on the edge of Puget Sound transformed into an art space with works by Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Richard Serra and others. Also launched, or re-launched, with much fanfare in the past few years are sculpture gardens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Given the attention lavished on sculptural museum designs by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, it seems fitting that sculpture gardens and those who design them should also achieve greater recognition.Sculpture gardens range in size from vast parks like the 500-acre Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, to compact urban settings like that of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The unifying quality is a sense of informality compared with indoor museum settings. According to John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, “Sculpture gardens provide a more welcoming environment. They encourage a direct dialogue between works and visitors. Children can run around in them.” Additionally, depending on the venue, visitors can do something not permitted in a museum—touch the artwork. “The essence of sculpture is to caress it,” says Bullard, and the opportunity for such interactions is one of the reasons his museum’s 5-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden is popular.
The modern public sculpture garden was born in the late 19th century with the advent of public museums. In the United States, the first such garden was Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, near Georgetown, South Carolina, founded in 1931 by Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, the latter a noted sculptor and the garden’s designer. However, the concept dates back to classical antiquity, according to Laurie Olin, a Philadelphia-based landscape architect who created the National Gallery’s sculpture garden. He says the first-century B.C. Roman historian Sallust, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, developed the prototype—extensive landscaped gardens that contained an impressive assemblage of iconic sculpture including the “Dying Gaul,” which is now in Rome’s Capitoline Museum.
Then as now, a key distinction of sculpture gardens is the obvious absence of climate control. Viewing sculpture outdoors, says Boston landscape architect Douglas Reed, involves “a dynamism of light, moisture and atmospheric conditions,” which alter with every visit, thus refreshing each experience. His current project, the 105- acre site at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be used to educate the public about nature and art. Olin, speaking of Sol LeWitt’s ziggurat- like sculpture “Four-Sided Pyramid” in the National Gallery’s garden, says, “Depending on how the light hits it, the sculpture appears all white, a combination of white and dark, then all dark.”
“The challenge of designing a sculpture garden is replacing the neutrality of the gallery with the complexity of nature,” says New York landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg. Designing outdoor rooms that facilitate the type of compare-andcontrast relationship one has indoors is challenging enough. The complication is that leaves have color, texture and form, which can clash with and upstage the artwork. Scale is also important: Pieces that seem enormous indoors can be dwarfed by nature. Nancy Goslee Power, a Santa Monica, California, designer says her goal at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena was to create a “very calm environment, a place of peace” at the museum’s sculpture garden. Her solution was a sequence of individual settings in a serpentine path that hugs the contours of a meandering pond. The design allows for the appreciation of individual artworks but also holds together as a subtle, cohesive narrative.One of the greatest pleasures in viewing sculpture al fresco is how seasonal variations in the landscape and changes in weather reveal nuances and subtleties in the artwork. Jeff Spaulding, a Washington, D.C., sculptor, loves that “great golden hour just before sunset”—the coloration lends majesty and the long shadows, romantic mystery. Alternatively, “after a snow,” he says, “everything looks a little more real.” Perhaps this embrace of the ephemeral and enigmatic in nature is the essence of the sculpture garden.
Nord Wennerstrom is a freelance writer and art critic based in Washington, D.C.
THE EXPERTS' FAVORITE GARDENS
A survey of some opinionated landscape architects, designers, artists and curators yielded the following list of favorite U.S. sculpture gardens. Determining factors include the quality of the artwork (which all considered paramount), juxtapositions and siting of the works and the balance of the art with its environment.
The Nasher Sculpture Center tops the list, says Mark Coetzee, director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. Van Valkenburg and Reed concur, the latter adding that the Nasher, designed by Peter Walker, is “one of the most successful integrations of building [designed by Renzo Piano] and interior and exterior space. It’s a seamless experience that begins with intimate pieces inside the building and flows into the garden. There’s a thoughtful itinerary and organizational structure—pieces don’t compete with each other; they have adequate space.”
The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is the largest urban sculpture garden in the nation; its discreet, rectilinear design masterfully unifies an eclectic group of works. (Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in collaboration with Peter Rothschild, with later additions by Michael Van Valkenburg.)
The Storm King Art Center is a “huge landscape for big stuff,” says Olin, who notes that it makes large-scale artworks approachable. (Designed by David Collens, Ralph Ogden, William Rutherford Sr. and H. Peter Stern.)
The Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens, on the 144-acre PepsiCo World Headquarters site in Purchase, New York, has a choice collection of excellent works that are beautifully sited—smaller works are featured in intimately scaled “rooms” and large works are given lots of breathing room and can be viewed from long vistas. (Designed by Russell Page, with later additions by François Goffinet.)
Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina is historically significant for its encyclopedic collection of American art. The 9,200-acre facility includes a 50-acre sculpture garden. As many as 850 works are displayed throughout the year, approximately 300 sculptures are exhibited on the grounds; 50 to 60 sculptures in the Rainey Sculpture Pavilion; and 400 to 500 artworks at the Offner Sculpture Learning & Research Center. (Designed by Anna Hyatt Huntington.)