Sculpture garden

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Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum, Antwerp, Belgium Middelheimpark.jpg
Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum, Antwerp, Belgium
The Esplanade Ernest-Cormier, a sculpture garden in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with Melvin Charney's work Colonnes allegoriques. Melvin Charney Jardin de sculptures.jpg
The Esplanade Ernest-Cormier, a sculpture garden in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with Melvin Charney's work Colonnes allégoriques.

A sculpture garden or sculpture park is an outdoor garden or park which includes the presentation of sculpture, usually several permanently sited works in durable materials in landscaped surroundings. [1]

Contents

A sculpture garden may be private, owned by a museum and accessible freely or for a fee, or public and accessible to all. Some cities own large numbers of public sculptures, some of which they may present together in city parks.

Exhibits range from individual, traditional sculptures to large site-specific installations. Sculpture gardens may also vary greatly in size and scope, either featuring the collected works of multiple artists, or the artwork of a single individual. These installations are related to several similar concepts, most notably land art, where landscapes become the basis of a site-specific sculpture, and topiary gardens, which consists of clipping or training live plants into living sculptures. A sculpture trail layout may be adopted, either in a park or through open countryside. The Irwell Sculpture Trail, the largest public art scheme in England, includes 28 art pieces along a 30-mile (48 km) footpath stretching from Salford Quays through Bury into Rossendale and up to the Pennines above Bacup. [2]

History

Sculpture gardens have a long history around the world – the oldest known collection of human constructions is a Neanderthal "sculpture garden" unearthed in Bruniquel Cave in France in 1990. [3] Within the cave, broken stalagmites were arranged in a series of stacked or ring-like structures approximately 175,000 years ago.

Garden statues, often of very high quality, were a feature of ancient Roman gardens, revived at the Renaissance, and then especially a feature of the Baroque garden. Palace gardens, such as the Gardens of Versailles, featured a concentration of sculpture equalling that of larger modern sculpture parks.

In the United States, the oldest public sculpture garden is a part of the joint park and wildlife preserve Brookgreen Gardens, [4] located in South Carolina. The property was opened in 1932, and has since been included on the National Register of Historic Places. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically accessible to the public; it is installed in public space in both outdoor and indoor settings. Public art seeks to embody public or universal concepts rather than commercial, partisan, or personal concepts or interests. Notably, public art is also the direct or indirect product of a public process of creation, procurement, and/or maintenance.

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

Brookgreen Gardens is a sculpture garden and wildlife preserve, located just south of Murrells Inlet, in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The 9,100-acre (37 km2) property includes several themed gardens featuring American figurative sculptures, the Lowcountry Zoo, and trails through several ecosystems in nature reserves on the property. It was founded by Archer Milton Huntington, stepson of railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington, and Anna Hyatt Huntington, his wife, to feature sculptures by Anna and her sister Harriet Randolph Hyatt Mayor, along with other American sculptors. Brookgreen Gardens was opened in 1932. It was developed on property of four former rice plantations, taking its name from the former Brookgreen Plantation, which dates to the antebellum period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Huntington Beach State Park</span> State park in South Carolina, United States

Huntington Beach State Park is a 2500 acre coastal preserve and state park near Murrells Inlet, in Georgetown County, South Carolina. It has a large sandy beach, few beach-goers, and numerous wild birds to watch over the seasons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sculpture trail</span> Trail connecting artworks

A sculpture trail - also known as "a culture walk" or "art trail" - is a walkway through open-air galleries of outdoor sculptures along a defined route with sequenced viewings encountered from planned preview and principal sight lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archer Milton Huntington</span> Philanthropist and art patron

Archer Milton Huntington was an American philanthropist and scholar, primarily known for his contributions to the field of Hispanic studies. He founded The Hispanic Society of America in New York City, and made numerous contributions to the American Geographical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milton Horn</span> American sculptor

Milton Horn was a Ukrainian American sculptor and artist known for work that, according to a 1957 citation of honor from the American Institute of Architects, demonstrated "the truth that architecture and sculpture are not two separate arts but, in the hands of sympathetic collaborators, one and the same".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental art</span> Genre of art engaging nature and ecology

Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Hyatt Huntington</span> American sculptor

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington was an American sculptor who was among New York City's most prominent sculptors in the early 20th century. At a time when very few women were successful artists, she had a thriving career. Hyatt Huntington exhibited often, traveled widely, received critical acclaim at home and abroad, and won multiple awards and commissions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atalaya and Brookgreen Gardens</span> United States historic place

Atalaya and Brookgreen Gardens is a National Historic Landmark District encompassing two formerly-united properties associated with sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) on the coast of Georgetown County, South Carolina. The district includes Atalaya Castle, now part of Huntington Beach State Park, and the sculpture garden of Brookgreen Gardens, both properties part of a large estate developed by Anna and Archer M. Huntington in the 1930s. It includes the nation's first formal sculpture garden, and one of the studios at which Huntington did her most productive work. The district was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art of the Upper Paleolithic</span> Oldest form of prehistoric art

The art of the Upper Paleolithic represents the oldest form of prehistoric art. Figurative art is present in Europe and Southeast Asia, beginning between about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Non-figurative cave paintings, consisting of hand stencils and simple geometric shapes, are somewhat older, at least 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 64,000 years. This latter estimate is due to a controversial 2018 study based on uranium-thorium dating, which would imply Neanderthal authorship and qualify as art of the Middle Paleolithic.

Mags Harries and Lajos Héder are artists working collaboratively to create public art across the United States from their studio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter J. Hood</span> American architect

Walter J. Hood is an American professor and former chair of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. In 2019, Hood was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "Genius Grant".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mario Korbel</span> American sculptor

Mario Joseph Korbel was a Czech-American sculptor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Furio Piccirilli</span> American artist

Furio Piccirilli was an Italian-born American sculptor and one of the Piccirilli Brothers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres</span> Public art park in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.

The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres, also referred to as the 100 Acres or Fairbanks Park, is a public interactive art park located on the Newfields campus in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Tefft</span> American sculptor

Charles Eugene Tefft was an American sculptor born in Brewer, Maine. His statue of Hannibal Hamlin is one of Maine's two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection located in the US Capitol in Washington D.C. A second Tefft statue of Hamlin stands in Norumbega Mall in downtown Bangor, Maine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of parks and gardens of Paris</span>

Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees. Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664; and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate. The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city. One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette (1987–1991) and Parc André Citroën (1992).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruniquel Cave</span> Cave and archaeological site in France with Neanderthal stalagmite structures

Bruniquel Cave is an archeological site near Bruniquel, in an area that has many paleolithic sites, east of Montauban in southwestern France. Annular (ring) and accumulation (pile) structures made of broken stalagmites have been found 336 metres from the cave entrance. Traces of fire were also found. The constructions have been dated to around 176,000 years ago.

Joan Hartley (1892–1984) was an American sculptor. She was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of American female artists who exhibited together from 1917 to 1945. The group, eventually numbering 30 painters and sculptors, exhibited annually in Philadelphia and later had traveling exhibitions at museums throughout the East Coast and the Midwest.

References

  1. McCarthy, Jane & Laurily Keir Epstein (1996). A Guide to the Sculpture Parks and Gardens of America . New York: Michael Kesend. p.  1. ISBN   978-0-935576-51-1.
  2. "Days out: the UK's best sculpture parks". The Week. 4 August 2020. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  3. Jaubert, Jacques; Verheyden, Sophie; Genty, Dominique; Soulier, Michel; Cheng, Hai; Blamart, Dominique; Burlet, Christian; Camus, Hubert; Delaby, Serge; Deldicque, Damien; Edwards, R. Lawrence (2016-06-02). "Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France". Nature. 534 (7605): 111–114. doi:10.1038/nature18291. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   27251286. S2CID   205249458.
  4. "Brookgreen Gardens - Murrells Inlet South Carolina SC". www.sciway.net. Retrieved 2016-12-16.
  5. "National Register of Historical Places - SOUTH CAROLINA (SC), Georgetown County". www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com. Retrieved 2016-12-16.

Further reading