While the display of sculpture in outdoor, often bucolic settings is as old as the medium itself, the idea of a large garden or park dedicated to its display is a fairly recent phenomenon. The earliest of such institutions were founded during the 1960s and 1970s, and included the Laumeier Sculpture Park, Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park, and Storm King Art Center in the United States and Kröller-Müller Museum Sculpture Garden and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Europe.Footnote1 Today, sculpture parks, or art parks as they are now sometimes called, are a late twentieth-century invention. Sculpture parks now exist as a specific type of arts institution on six continents, and predominantly show examples of modern and contemporary sculpture. Their origin coincides with notable temporary presentations of artwork in outdoor environments, artists’ increasing interests in moving beyond the space and scale of the gallery, and a changing environmental awareness spurred by the emerging consequences of late-stage capitalism.
Sculpture parks, as their name suggests, occupy large tracts of land and function as sites of aesthetically focused recreation. Owing to space requirements, they are usually found in more remote areas, on the outskirts or altogether outside of cities. While offering a leisure space for local communities, their remote locations also mean sculpture parks are tourist havens—pilgrimage sites for art aficionados, day trip destinations for urbanites looking to “escape to nature,” and boons for regional economies. Over the past fifty years, many more sculpture parks have been established around the world, including institutions both publicly and privately funded and operated. Many have also expanded during this time, both in terms of acreage and ambition, with new buildings and temporary exhibitions as well as offering more traditional museum amenities and programming. They are increasingly becoming sites for not just cultural but also social and community engagement.
Sculpture parks are also something of an aberration. There is an unavoidable artificiality to such a “natural” presentation of work in pastoral outdoor settings. They are highly controlled and orchestrated, but they still function as places of nature and bucolic respite, a quality that has proven a salvation to so many as of late—a very real balm during an extended period of immense fear and grief. During pandemic lockdowns and periods of social distancing, sculpture parks and other types of institutions with outdoor display spaces became uniquely positioned not only to continue offering a distinctive environment in which to experience art, but also as newly crucial safe spaces to gather, to experience nature and culture in person rather than mediated through a flat screen, or simply to breath in and enjoy the open air. On the most practical of levels, the pandemic has thus revealed a possible if unexpected justification for the existence of sculpture parks. Sculpture parks, however, are also having to contend with the climate crisis, managing properties and facilities that have seen smoke from fires, flooding from extreme storms and fronts, and increasingly volatile temperatures.
Perhaps surprisingly given these pressing issues as well as their unique purposes and development within the broader history of contemporary art, sculpture parks are critically underexamined. In what scholarly literature does exist, sculpture parks are often discussed monolithically or lumped together with smaller-scaled sculpture gardens, public art, and environmental or land art projects, all of which share important connective threads but each of which operate from and within distinct contexts. There is a tremendous amount of deviation across sculpture parks as typology: in their governance and funding structures, the type of work shown, overall goals and mission, and operating logistics. For some institutions, the focus is to create an outdoor gallery through permanent acquisition or long-term loan of preexisting works; for others, the purpose is to create a more organic, integrated experience, with works created from or within the surrounding landscape. Some do both. Regardless of the types of work they show, sculpture parks have become incubators, cemeteries, and transient spaces for some of the most significant sculpture of the past half century.
There remains much research to be done on the nature of sculpture parks and numerous questions still need to be answered. What do sculpture parks offer both practitioners and visitors? Are these sites and the works contained on or within them modern follies, interactive amusement parks for art, or sites for unique interventions? Are they best understood as incubators or cemeteries for some of the most significant sculpture of the past half century? Do they or can they help us consider the histories of the land upon which they rest or reveal decades, centuries of layered, complex connections to broader, troubled histories of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and migration? What is the relationship of sculpture parks to broader concepts of nature, ecology, recreation, art tourism, community, site, or public art?
Interest in these questions and responses to the initial call for papers were robust, but most submissions focused on the history of specific, individual institutions. While this type of research is needed and valuable, such narrow focus proves difficult in a single journal issue. The selection process to determine which institutions get included and which get left out would feel arbitrary or inherently inequitable, especially considering that sculpture parks have become a global phenomenon. One solution was to limit the scope to projects and institutions in the United States and its territorires. Another was not to include any essays or interviews that function as singular case studies. This is not to suggest that only United States–based parks are significant or that analysis of individual parks do not have an important role to play in a broader history of the type, but rather attempts to offer one possible place to start what hopefully continues to be a rich and robust conversation.
There was also an intention to facilitate a tone throughout the issue that felt more informal, speculative, personal. From the inclusion of practitioners and arts professionals engaged on a day-to-day level with these types of spaces to scholars who themselves have visited, encountered, or inhabited these places, it felt important to include perspectives that attend not just to the history of sculpture parks but also to their social, bodily, and environmental effects. Jana La Brasca uses the framework of time and temporality to examine interventions in three parklike sites—Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas; temporary projects by Michelle Stuart and Jody Pinto at Artpark, in Lewiston, New York; and works by Alice Aycock and Mary Miss sited at the Battery Park landfill in lower Manhattan—to stretch the definition of what is considered a sculpture park and what role permanence plays in our assumptions about them. Tola Porter writes from the perspective of museum education and visitor engagement to question who sculpture parks are for and how they are used, especially at institutions charged with managing and stewarding permanent collections. Centering an artist’s perspective, sculptor Jean Shin and curator Jessica Wilcox offer a vibrant discussion of sculpture parks, and a roundtable discussion among curators and directors at leading institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico provides perspectives on current and future challenges, including ever-pressing questions of land use and acknowledgment, sustainability, and humanity’s relationship to nature.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For more on the histories of these institutions, see Laumeier Sculpture Park: Ten Sites (St. Louis: Laumeier Sculpture Park, 1992) and “Celebrating 40 Years of Sculpture,” https://history.laumeiersculpturepark.org/; Terry A. Neff, The Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park (University Park, IL: Governors State University Foundation, 1987); Storm King Art Center Sculpture Guide (New Windsor, NY: Storm King Art Center, 2017); Sculpture Garden Kröller-Müller Museum (Rotterdam: NAi, 2007); and Lynne Green, Peter Murray, and Simon Armitage, Yorkshire Sculpture Park: Landscape for Art (Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2008).