DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum

Last updated
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
DeCordova-museum.png
USA Massachusetts location map.svg
Red pog.svg
Location of deCordova in Massachusetts
Usa edcp location map.svg
Red pog.svg
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (the United States)
Established1950 [1]
Location51 Sandy Pond Road
Lincoln, Massachusetts
United States
Coordinates 42°25′52″N71°18′41″W / 42.43108°N 71.31143°W / 42.43108; -71.31143
Type Art museum and sculpture park
DirectorJessica May
Owner The Trustees of Reservations
Public transit accessLincoln stop on the Fitchburg MBTA Line and a 1.5 mile walk
Website deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum

The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is a sculpture park and contemporary art museum on the southern shore of Flint's Pond in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 20 miles northwest of Boston. It was established in 1950, and is the largest park of its kind in New England, encompassing 30 acres.

Contents

Providing a constantly changing landscape of large-scale, outdoor, modern and contemporary sculpture and site-specific installations, the Sculpture Park displays more than 60 works, most on loan to the museum. Inside, the museum features rotating exhibitions. DeCordova's permanent collection focuses on works in all media, with particular emphasis on photography and works by artists with connections to New England.

History

DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is located on the former estate of Julian de Cordova. [1] Independent appraisers determined that de Cordova's collections were not of substantial interest or value, so the collection was sold and the proceeds were used to create a museum of regional contemporary art. The Trustees reached this decision after they noticed the near absence of modern art exhibitions in the Boston area, and the lack of venues for works by regional contemporary artists. When it officially opened in 1950 as the DeCordova and Dana Museum, it was the only museum to focus its exhibitions and collecting activities on living New England artists, while also offering an educational program in the visual arts.

The founding director was Frederick P. Walkey, a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He aggressively organized an exhibition schedule and arts instruction program with a clear educational mandate. DeCordova established a reputation for ground-breaking exhibitions that introduced New England audiences to important trends within contemporary art both regionally and nationally, including Pop Art and Boston's post-war expressionist movement. It changed its name to the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in around 1989. Georgia Litwack taught photography courses at the deCordova. [2]

In 2019, deCordova was acquired by The Trustees of Reservations, a land conservation and historic preservation non-profit. [3]

DeCordova is under the artistic direction of Jessica May. [4] The prior director of deCordova was John Ravenal, who was appointed in 2015.

Architecture

The New England architect John Quincy Adams designed the extensive renovations that transformed Julian de Cordova's mansion into a public museum prior to its opening in 1950. The lower floors housed galleries, while the third floor offered studio art classes. The School attracted hundreds of students, eventually overwhelming the limited space within the Museum. In 1966, deCordova constructed a complex of four studio buildings to accommodate its expanded educational programs and meet the equipment standards of a professional art studio. In the early 1980s, the Museum consolidated and renovated two existing buildings to form administrative offices for the School and its outreach programs.

In 1998, the institution completed the New Century Campaign for deCordova, an $8 million effort to upgrade its building. Kallmann McKinnell & Wood modernized and expanded deCordova’s educational facilities to include a new studio, a store, and a gallery dedicated to exhibitions by School instructors and students. The Museum’s exhibition space was expanded with a 20,000 square foot addition and a roof terrace to provide views of the Park. The main galleries were renovated to install a climate control system, a café, and a library.

Art

Texas Triangles, by Charles Ginnever at the DeCordova Sculpture Park Texas Triangles.jpg
Texas Triangles, by Charles Ginnever at the DeCordova Sculpture Park

DeCordova's emphasis on modern and contemporary art fueled its rapid popularity during the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1980s, the Museum faced competition from a growing number of local museums, universities, and private galleries all of which shared a similar artistic mission. With the arrival of director Paul Master-Karnik in 1982, deCordova initiated a series of curatorial programs to further strengthen its commitment to New England’s contemporary artists. Master-Karnik introduced the Annual Exhibition, formerly Artist/Visions, which featured works by emerging New England artists and provided an annual snapshot of regional talent.

To maintain the institution’s connection to New England and its support for local emerging artists, former director Dennis Kois (appointed in 2008) established the PLATFORM series, an ongoing exhibition series of site-specific installations by New England artists. In 2010 the deCordova Biennial replaced the Annual Exhibition series to expand the curatorial voice, allowing for an advisory board and co-curator opportunities. Now occurring every other year, the deCordova Biennial displays New England’s leading emerging to mid-career artists, emphasizing the quality and vitality of the art created in this region.

In order to emphasize its focus, the Museum officially changed its name in 2009 from deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park to deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. The landscaped lawns, forests, fields, and terraces of deCordova's Sculpture Park reveal a cross-section of how contemporary artists work outdoors, and how outdoor art enters into complex dialogues with sites and environmental conditions. This is accomplished with a three-tiered program of collection works, loans, and site-specific projects and commissions. The collection includes works by significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists that provide an art-historical context for other work in the park, and include sculptures by Dorothy Dehner, Antony Gormley, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Alexander Liberman, Nam June Paik, Beverly Pepper, Jaume Plensa, George Rickey, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Artists with sculptures currently on loan to deCordova include Jim Dine, DeWitt Godfrey, Paul Matisse, and Isaac Witkin. Site-specific projects and special installations are designed and implemented especially for the Sculpture Park. Recent site-specific works include Steven Siegel’s Big, with Rift; Fritz Horstman's "Formwork for a Spiral Movement"; and a major installation by environmental artist Alan Sonfist, The Endangered Species of New England. In 2019, deCordova completed work on Watershed, a permanent installation by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. [5] [6] [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fruitlands Museum</span> United States historic place

Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, is a museum about multiple visions of America on the site of the short-lived utopian community, Fruitlands. The museum includes the Fruitlands farmhouse, a museum about Shaker life, an art gallery with 19th-century landscape paintings, vernacular American portraits, and other changing exhibitions, and a museum of Native American history. In 2023, readers of USA Today voted to name Fruitlands as one of the ten best history museums in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula von Rydingsvard</span> American sculptor (born 1942)

Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston</span> Art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, US

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple name changes as well as moving its galleries and support spaces over 13 times. Its current home was built in 2006 in the South Boston Seaport District and designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Teresita Fernández</span> American artist

Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.

The National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) is a center in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts founded in 1968 by Elma Lewis to "preserv[e] and foster the cultural arts heritage of black peoples worldwide through arts teaching, and the presentation of professional works in all fine arts disciplines." Although the organization's name specifies African American artists, the organizational mandate includes all African diasporic art. The NCAAA is the largest independent black cultural arts institution in New England, United States. Its alumni have distinguished themselves in the performing arts internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana al-Hadid</span> American artist

Diana al-Hadid is a Syrian-born American contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations, and drawings using various media. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Wilson (artist)</span> American visual artist (born 1949)

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Wolfe (artist)</span> American painter

Jack Wolfe was a 20th-century American painter most known for his abstract art, portraiture, and political paintings.

Rona Pondick is an American sculptor. She lives and works in New York City. Using the language of the body in her sculpture, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, has been of interest to Pondick since the beginnings of her career in 1977. An abiding concern of hers has been the exploration of the use of different materials, a consistent motif that runs throughout her work from its beginnings to the present day.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Cole (artist)</span> American sculptor

Dave Cole is an American contemporary visual artist specializing in sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Miss</span> American environmental artist (born 1944)

Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.

Rachel Perry is an American artist. She is known for conceptual works using drawing, photography, video, collage, sculpture and performance, which address “the fleeting nature of experience, the elusiveness of desire, and the persistence of objects in a throwaway culture.” Art critic Jerry Saltz has written that her work "not only grappl[es] with consumerism but [she is] just about swallowed whole by it.” Her work also considers themes of gender identity, narcissism, privacy and information overload.

Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

Steve Locke is an American artist who explores figuration and perceptions of the male figure, and themes of masculinity and homosexuality through drawing, painting, sculpture and installation art. He lives and works in upstate New York and in Brooklyn where he teaches at Pratt Institute.

John B. Ravenal is an art historian, writer, and museum curator. Before 1998, he was the Associate Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 1998 to 2015 he was curator of contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, where he organized exhibitions of Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit (2014); Xu Bing: Tobacco Project(2011), and Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit (2010). He was curator of the VMFA's Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch exhibition, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life. His lecture about the exhibition took place in the Leslie Cheek Theater in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The show opened in November 2016 in partnership with the Munch Museum in Oslo. He is the author of the exhibition catalogue Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murray Dewart</span> American sculptor

Murray Dewart is an American sculptor best known for his large gate-like structures in granite and bronze. Dewart's sculptures are often created for site-specific locations and installed in parks and gardens. His work is in more than thirty museums and public collections around the world. He is the editor of the Random House anthology Poems About Sculpture.

Craig Stockwell is a visual artist who paints large, colorful, abstract paintings. He served (2013-20) as the Director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J.R. Uretsky</span> American artist

J. R. Uretsky is an artist, performer, musician and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island.

References

  1. 1 2 "The History of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum". The Trustees of Reservations. Retrieved 2021-07-16.
  2. Marquard, Bryan (May 17, 2020). "Georgia Litwack, whose photography focused on accomplished women, dies at 98 of COVID-19 complications". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  3. Laidler, John (26 March 2019). "Town approves Trustees' acquisition of deCordova park and museum". Boston Globe. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  4. Whyte, Murray (12 March 2021). "Jessica May named to artistic leadership at deCordova and other Trustees properties". Boston Globe. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  5. "Watershed". The Trustees of Reservations. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  6. Rabinkin, Gretchen (9 January 2020). "Hidden in Plain Sight". ArchitectureBoston. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  7. Shea, Andrea (9 November 2019). "How A Drain Hole Inspired Land Artist Andy Goldsworthy's 'Watershed' At The deCordova". The Artery. WBUR. Retrieved 16 July 2021.