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Alene Grossman Memorial Arbor and Flower Garden
Horticulture Features
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder
Mark di Suvero
Judith Shea
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Barry Flanagan
Charles Ginnever
Brower Hatcher
Jene Highstein
Sol LeWitt
David Nash
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
Siah Armajani
Jacques Lipchitz
Jonathan Silver
Richard Stankiewicz
Kinji Akagawa
Saul Baizerman
Scott Burton
Deborah Butterfield
Tony Cragg
Mark di Suvero
Dan Graham
Jenny Holzer
Ellsworth Kelly
Georg Kolbe
Philip Larson
Giacomo Manzł
Marino Marini
Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Reuben Nakian
Louise Nevelson
Isamu Noguchi
Martin Puryear
George Segal
Richard Serra
Tony Smith
Jackie Winsor
Jackie Ferrara
Frank Gehry
Mario Merz
Sarah Sze
Atelier van Lieshout
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Garden Destinations |
 Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988 The vine-covered arbor and flower garden, loving gifts of the N. Bud Grossman family, commemorate the ideals, achievements, and memory of Alene Lorberbaum Grossman (1922-1988), who harbored a deep love of natural beauty and spent much of her life working for the public good.  The spectacular Alene Grossman Memorial Arbor and Flower Garden is a living sculpture itself. Red cardinal climber and hyacinth bean sheathe its stainless-steel arches, as clematis and morning glory provide color at moments throughout the summer. Spectacular plantings of sun-loving perennials and annuals--Siberian iris, black-eyed Susan, bee balm, false indigo, candy lily, balloon flower, aster, cosmos, and heliotrope, among others--flank the southern border of the arbor. Shade-tolerant varieties--meadow rue, bleeding heart, astilbe, and more--grace its northern edge. The artful display changes throughout the growing season, as spring, summer, and fall varieties take their places along the 300-foot walk.  Octopus, 1964 steel, paint overall 116 1/2 x 111 x 67 1/4 in. Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, 1968 More Information
 The Spinner, 1966 aluminum, steel, paint overall 235 x 351 x 351 in. Gift of Dayton Hudson Corporation, Minneapolis, 1971 More Information
 Molecule, 1977-1983 steel, paint height: 456 in. Gift of Honeywell Inc. in honor of Harriet and Edson W. Spencer, 1991 The monumental scale and sweeping gestures of this red-painted sculpture are characteristic of the enormous outdoor structures Mark di Suvero has been making since the 1970s, using cranes to manipulate the massive industrial materials with which he works. Here, a pair of enormous steel beams meet at their ends, creating a triangular form that tips at an alarmingly improbable angle. At the point of the beams' juncture are sections of two flat, centerless discs. A longer beam forms the final leg of the tripod, but travels on some 38 feet into the air, piercing a third disc interwoven with the other two at the point of intersection. The cumulative effect recalls all the visual and emotive force we attach to the atomic world: dynamic, red-hot, powerful, and strangely elegant. Molecule, like all of di Suvero's large-scale sculptures, invites the viewer to inspect its lines and spaces from every angle. More Information
 Without Words, 1988 bronze, marble, limestone 78 x 80 x 118 in. overall Gift of Jeanne and Richard Levitt, 1988 Throughout her work, Judith Shea has used clothing to explore the nature and history of sculpture. Trained as a fashion designer, she soon found that field too restrictive and abandoned it in favor of sculpture, using clothes at first as abstract forms and, later, as surrogates for the human presence itself. By the mid-1980s, she began to place her figures into groups, suggesting psychological relationships among them and the possibility of a story. The three symbolic presences of Without Words are a rumpled raincoat, a spare and elegant dress, and the fragment of a classically molded head. This haunting trio seems to be carrying on a dialogue about modern life and antiquity. The head was based on an Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty sculpture of Queen Tiye; the dress is reminiscent both of archaic Greek statuary and the sleek couture of the 1950s; the coat is modern, yet recalls the flowing drapery of classical sculpture. More Information
 Sagacious Head 6 and Sagacious Head 7, 1989-1990 bronze No. 6: 98 1/2 x 187 x 108 1/4 in. No. 7: 101 x 202 3/4 x 100 1/2 in. Purchased with funds provided by the Frederick R. Weisman Collection of Art, 1992 The two giant, pyramidal bronze forms that Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz calls Sagacious Heads rise out of the ground like a pair of mysterious beasts or ancient, scarred mountains. For Abakanowicz, known for her haunting groupings of abstracted figures, the head has a special significance: it is "first to see, to react, to inform the whole body," but more importantly, it is "first exposed to the unknown."These featureless heads--silent and mute--have been severed from their bodies and thus from all their responsibilities. Their immutable, enigmatic presence seems to call forth the unknown itself. Abakanowicz fashioned the heads out of Styrofoam, plaster, and fabric, working the soft surfaces of the plaster with her fingers and scoring the Styrofoam with a knife to create the roughened, hidelike textures of the final forms, cast in bronze. The two heads in the Garden are the last in a series of seven the artist executed between 1987 and 1990. Abakanowicz also created a group of ten monolithic bronze "dragon heads" for the Olympic Park at the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea. More Information
 Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers, 1983 bronze, limestone 102 x 112 x 75 in. Gift of Anne Larsen Simonson and Glen and Marilyn Nelson, 1987 Throughout his career, Barry Flanagan has been challenging the status quo in sculpture. As a student in London in the 1960s, when other artists were using industrial methods and materials, Flanagan began shaping such unorthodox substances as sand, burlap, felt, and plastic into ephemeral shapes, focusing on the process of artmaking rather than the finished, permanent object. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, by contrast, when figurative sculpture was hardly the norm, Flanagan began making representational images (hares, helmets, and horses) using surprisingly traditional materials and processes: lost-wax bronze casting, gilding, stone carving. Here, an exuberant, bounding hare balances atop a classically formed bell, providing an interesting study in contrasts. The sinuous lines and playful vitality of the hare counter-balance the elegant formality of the bell, which evokes centuries of the bronze-casting tradition. The novel juxtaposition of the two forms--both symbols of fertility and both frequent motifs in Flanagan's art--conjures up new and fantastic associations. More Information
 Nautilus, 1976 Cor-Ten steel approx. 132 x 264 x 408 in.; dimensions variable with installation Acquired with funds from Dr. and Mrs. John S. Jacoby in memory of John Dixon Jacoby, Suzanne Walker and Thomas N. Gilmore, the Art Center Acquisition Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1976 The design for Charles Ginnever's mammoth steel sculpture was inspired by one of nature's unique primitive structures: the spiraling, chambered shell of the marine mollusk known as the nautilus. Like Richard Serra's Five Plates, Two Poles, also constructed from massive plates of industrial Cor-Ten steel, the sculpture's seemingly precarious balance merely suggests impending collapse. To understand its spatially complex form the viewer must circle around the piece, tracing the spiral motion of the progressively sized chambers to discover the secret of its design: six flat parallelograms, folded at regularly increasing intervals, that are welded together. Ginnever got the idea for folding flat sheets into a three-dimensional object--abstract yet suggesting a real figure--from Japanese origami, the decorative art of cut-and-folded paper. The changing light and seasons interact with the sculpture's surfaces to create subtly shifting visual effects. More Information
 Prophecy of the Ancients, 1988 cast stone, stainless steel, steel, bronze, aluminum, ceramic height: 202 in.; diameter: 246 in. Gift of the Lilly family, 1989 Brower Hatcher was trained in engineering and industrial design before he turned to sculpture in the early 1970s. In his stone and steel-mesh sculpture for the Garden, he melds the logic of an engineer with a visionary's impulse to transcend time and space. A futuristic dome, composed of thousands of flexible wire polyhedrons, rests atop six mock-Egyptian columns in a blend of ancient and modern architectural styles. Embedded within the structure and seeming to hover in space are an assortment of common objects and abstract forms: a table, a ladder, a chair, a turtle (whose patterned shell recalls the gridded structure of the dome), random letters, numbers, discs, and dashes. Hatcher offers up these private symbols for universal interpretation, as viewers are inspired to construct their own meanings from the galaxy of images suspended above them. More Information
 Untitled, 1987-1988 granite three elements: 108 x 48 x 28 in.; 75 x 61 x 43 in.; 30 x 90 x 51 in. Acquired with funds provided by Martha and John Gabbert, Joanne and Philip Von Blon, and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1989 Jene Highstein studied philosophy, painting, and drawing before turning to sculpture in the late 1960s, applying cement over steel frames to create the large, rounded shapes--mounds and spheres--that interested him. When he finally began to carve in stone around 1980, he was able to explore new aspects of these forms. The three massive monoliths that form the work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden were shaped from Pennsylvania granite, scored with a diamond-tipped circular saw, and then chiseled to expose the crystalline structure of the stone. Although they might at first appear to be objects found in nature, primitive totems arranged by tribal worshipers, or even meteors cast from the skies, they are, in fact, carefully crafted works intended to provoke a range of associations regarding nature and culture. More Information
 X with Columns, 1996 cinder block, concrete 168 x 312 x 312 in. Partial gift of the artist with funds provided by the Judy and Kenneth Dayton Garden Fund; materials provided by Anchor Block Company, 1996 Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt has been well known since the 1960s for his sculpture, graphics, and wall drawings. An example of his cubic, modular sculpture is installed on the Walker's roof terrace, and his Four Geometric Figures in a Room can be seen on the walls of the museum's lower lobby. Concepts or ideas are the basic materials of LeWitt's art, which often exists as a set of detailed instructions. As with a musical score or architectural blueprint, the realization of the final work is relegated to others. LeWitt uses the most neutral of materials--here, commercial cinder blocks--and rigorously deploys them in basic geometric configurations. Both the materials and forms he uses intentionally lack any expressive qualities in themselves. They are rather like "grammatical devices" in language, which take on significance only throughtheir combination with one another in actual use. Like David Nash's Standing Frame, LeWitt's X with Columns provides frames through which views of the surrounding landscape are visible. More Information
 Standing Frame, 1987 charred white oak 172 x 209 3/4 x 209 1/2 in. Gift of Star Tribune and Cowles Media Foundation, 1987 British artist David Nash has been making sculptures from trees since the late 1970s. An ardent environmentalist, he uses only trees that have fallen or cuts fully mature specimens to open space for new growth. He then uses the wood as completely as possible, including the twigs and scraps, which are reduced to charcoal for his drawings. This work for the Garden was made from two white oaks found near Taylors Falls, Minnesota. Nash fashioned the stripped branches and trunk into an open square frame supported on three "legs," its sections joined in tongue-and-groove fashion and secured with wooden pegs. The resulting structure allows visitors to frame idealized views of the surrounding land and cityscape, reminding us of the role art can play in unifying man and nature. In 1994, after the wood's natural aging had turned the sculpture a pale gray, Nash charred its surface with a propane torch to embolden its sculptural line and provide a new seal. More Information
 Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988 aluminum, stainless steel, paint 354 x 618 x 162 in. Gift of Frederick R. Weisman in honor of his parents, William and Mary Weisman, 1988 Claes Oldenburg is best known for his ingenious, oversized renditions of ordinary objects, like the giant "soft" three-way plug and overturned bag of french fries in the Walker's own collection. He and Coosje van Bruggen, his wife and collaborator, had already created a number of large-scale public sculptures, including the Batcolumn in Chicago, when they were asked to design a fountain-sculpture for the planned Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The spoon had appeared as a motif in a number of Oldenburg's drawings and plans over the years, inspired by a novelty item (a spoon resting on a glob of fake chocolate) he had acquired in 1962. Eventually the utensil emerged--in humorously gigantic scale--as the theme of the Minneapolis project. Van Bruggen contributed the cherry as a playful reference to the Garden's formal geometry, which reminded her of Versailles and the exaggerated dining etiquette Louis XIV imposed there. She also conceived the pond's shape in the form of linden seed. (Linden trees are planted along the allées that stretch before the fountain.) The complex fabrication of the 5,800 pound spoon and 1,200 pound cherry was carried out at two shipbuilding yards in New England. The sculpture has become a beloved icon in the Garden, whether glaceed with snow in the Minnesota winters or gleaming in the warmer months, with water flowing over the surface of the cherry and a fine mist rising from its stem. More Information
 Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, 1988 steel, wood, paint, concrete, brass length: 379 ft. Gift of the Minneapolis Foundation/Irene Hixon Whitney Family Founder-Advisor Fund, the Persephone Foundation, and Wheelock Whitney, with additional support and services from the Federal Highway Administration, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the City of Minneapolis, and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1988 Twin Cities-based artist Siah Armajani is known for his pioneering public works, which have helped to redefine the social function of art both in this country and abroad. More than simply art for public spaces, Armajani's bridges, plazas, and other public art pieces--at once utilitarian and symbolic--are intended to reflect the ideals of a democratic society and to foster discourse and learning in the communities they inhabit. Armajani explored the bridge as a metaphor for passage in a number of his early conceptual models and works. In 1970, for example, for the exhibition 9 Artists/9 Spaces, he fashioned an 85-foot-long, rough-timbered wooden bridge. Rising quite surprisingly to a gabled peak at its middle, it sheltered a lone pine tree planted beneath. The idea of passage became decidedly more functional with Armajani's full-scale commission forthe Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, which allows pedestrians to cross the sixteen lanes of streets and highway that had severed the Garden from neighboring Loring Park for many years. The artist's design incorporates the three basic types of bridge structure: beam (across its fir-planked, horizontal span), arch (for the eastern portion), and suspension (for the western portion). To underscore the sense of transition from one part to the next, Armajani painted each half a different, atmospheric shade: pale blue for the upward arching portion and yellow, recreated from the hue that Thomas Jefferson used at his home, Monticello, for the inverted arch. Affixed to the upper lintel of the span and running in each direction across the bridge are the words of a poem--a meditation on movement, place, order, and crossing--which Armajani commissioned specially from the renowned American poet John Ashbery. More Information
 Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II, 1944/1953 bronze 91 3/4 x 90 x 57 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1956 When Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz emigrated to Paris in 1909, his friendship with the Spanish artists Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso led him to explore Cubism in his sculptures. By the late 1920s, however, Lipchitz moved from these figures made of flat planes and angular masses to a looser style based on natural forms, and he began to explore themes and ideas in his sculptures rather than purely formal relationships. The theme of Prometheus emerged as early as 1933 in his work, as a symbol of human progress and determination and a parable for the triumph of democracy over fascism. In the Greek legend, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it as a gift on humankind. This so enraged the god Zeus that he had Prometheus chained to a rocky mountainside, to be tortured by a vulture for all eternity. In Lipchitz's sculptural version of the story, however, Prometheus triumphs over his fate: freed from his chains, he strangles the bird with one hand as he grips the claws in the other. The original version of Prometheus Strangling the Vulture was a 30-foot work cast in plaster for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. After the artist resettled in America, the Brazilian government commissioned him to sculpt another Prometheus for the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro. The Walker sculpture is based on this 1944 version, which was recast in bronze in 1953. More Information
 Wounded Amazon, 1982-1983 bronze 85 x 21 x 16 in. Gift of Sidney Singer, 1987 New York sculptor Jonathan Silver was known for his figurative sculptures, classical forms infused with an intensely modern sense of emotion. Silver created exaggerated, fragmented figures that were greatly influenced by the sculpture of Rodin and by Giacometti, whose "stick" men possess a similar elemental and primitive force. The abstract, headless torso in the Garden depicts an Amazon,a member of the race of mythological Greek warrior women who excluded men from their society. The name Amazon itself is Greek for "breastless," since, according to legend, it was the practice of these women archers to burn off their right breasts in order to pull back their bows more effectively. Never, however, was this disfiguration depicted in the ancient images of the beautiful warriors on temple friezes and vases. Silver's Amazon, by contrast, has been wounded. Although proud in stature, the roughened, flayed surfaces of her skin suggest the frightening mutilation of myth and the ravages earned from a life of battle. More Information
 Grass, 1980-1981 steel 151 x 104 x 37 in. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1988 Richard Stankiewicz lived next to a scrap yard when he was a child and often made toys for himself from the random materials he found there. After studying painting in New York and sculpture in Paris, Stankiewicz returned to "junk" in 1951, creating the first of his welded steel sculptures from pieces of scrap metal he unearthed while converting his back yard into a garden. During the 1950s, Stankiewicz assembled fragments of old boiler tanks, chains, wire, machine parts, and other discarded metal objects into bizarre, often humorous "people." Turning to more formal, abstract forms in the 1960s, he eventually abandoned junk in favor of prefabricated industrial components such as plate steel, I-beams, angle irons, and pipe. Shortly before his death in 1983, the artist began to reintroduce both found materials and representation into his works. In this piece in the Garden, the last large-scale sculpture he produced, Stankiewicz welded together hoops and pipes to create an elegantly linear form that suggests a giant, weedy tuft of grass. More Information
 Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, 1987 granite, basalt, cedar 45 x 144 1/2 x 40 in. In memory of Elizabeth Decker Velie, 1988 Born in Tokyo and working in Minneapolis since the 1960s, Kinji Akagawa combines the elegant simplicity of Japanese aesthetics with a deep concern for the impact of art on public places. He strives to invite private activities such as reading, thinking, and even writing into the "street" furniture he creates and incorporates common, local materials into their context. The bench he created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden combines unfinished green basalt from Minnesota, a vertical base of highly polished granite from South Dakota, and a horizontal slab of cedar that recalls forests from the region's past. The three elements retain their separate and unique characteristics as they combine to create an elegant whole that invites us to rest, read, and reflect in the Garden. More Information
 Nike, 1949-1952 copper 67 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 18 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1953 Nike, in Greek mythology, was the goddess of victory who aided Zeus in his battle against the Titans. Often depicted as a winged figure, we know her best as the Nike of Samothrace (or Winged Victory), one of the finest examples of Hellenistic sculpture and a highlight of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Saul Baizerman's academic training--in Russia as a young man and later at the Beaux Arts Institute in New York--introduced him to such mythological themes and to the idealized human figures of classical sculpture, which he explored extensively in his mature work. Subtly molding his forms from huge sheets of copper, he reinterpreted these beings in the stylized, sleek "moderne" sensibility of the 1950s. The copper fabricating process allowed Baizerman to endow his figures with an immediacy and vitality that he felt unable to attain in bronze. Indeed, this Nike seems nearly ready to rise up in flight. More Information
 Seat-leg Table, 1986/1991 sandstone 28 1/2 x 56 x 56 in. Gift of Honeywell Inc. in honor of Harriet and Edson W. Spencer, 1992 As a performance artist in the early 1970s, Scott Burton combined "found" body movements with props such as chairs, which he situated on the stage in place of actors. As he turned to sculpture, Burton continued to explore the everyday world, designing objects that are at once utilitarian and highly aesthetic. Consciously drawing on the earlier twentieth-century traditions of De Stijl and Bauhaus design, his "furniture" sculptures are severely minimal, functional forms. They are made, however, with traditional sculptural materials and processes. The sandstone table in the Garden is supported by four cubic blocks that double as both legs and seats. Burton's art was meant to provide a direct means of social engagement. Indeed, visitors may explore this curious table by contemplating its form and possible uses or by using its "legs" as chairs on which to rest and view the surrounding sights. More Information
 Woodrow, 1988 bronze 99 x 105 x 74 in. Gift of Harriet and Edson W. Spencer, 1988 Deborah Butterfield, who owns, rides, and trains horses on her ranch in Montana, has likened the act of "building" a horse through training to the creative process of building her sculptures. Since the early 1970s, Butterfield has been creating magnificently observed, highly individualized horses from a diversity of found materials--fragments of wood, wire, scrap metal, mud, brick dust, and straw. Woodrow is something of a technical tour de force. Butterfield took a selection of sticks, tree branches, and bark, cast each element individually in bronze, and then assembled and welded the pieces together to create the stately beast. Each element was then patinated to create the look of the original sticks and branches. The trompe l'oeil effect is so convincing that many visitors to the Garden believe the piece is actually made of wood. More Information
 Ordovician Pore, 1989 granite, steel 96 x 90 x 124 in. overall Gift of Joanne and Philip Von Blon, 1989 Trained as a scientist, Tony Cragg creates art that investigates the natural world. Yet if his sculptures comment on such topics as molecular structure, the human vascular system, or the Newtonian light spectrum, it is his use of man-made forms (either found or constructed) that transforms them into complex meditations on contemporary life. Here Cragg has constructed steel elements on a granite base--two smooth-surfaced concave cylindrical forms and two elemental biomorphic shapes--that comment on the Ordovician geological era of 500 million years ago, when oxygen was introduced into the atmosphere. While the oxygen gave rise to terrestrial life, it simultaneously killed off the species of algae that had produced it. The close resemblance of the cylinders to the cooling towers of nuclear power plants perhaps suggests an analogous life-death conundrum for our own technological age. More Information
 Arikidea, 1977-1982 Cor-Ten steel, steel, wood 316 1/2 x 510 x 450 in. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1985 More than 26 feet high and 42 feet wide, and weighing in at approximately three tons, Mark di Suvero's Arikidea is certainly deserving of the description "monumental." Yet this massive structure belies an ingeniously constructed delicacy. The gigantic steel beams have been masterfully balanced in such a way that a simple touch or a passing breeze will cause the structure to sway gently. The wooden swing suspended from its center playfully invites the viewer to further interact with the work, moving into and through its airy spaces. Beginning in the late 1950s, di Suvero drew on the gestural ideas of Abstract Expressionist painting, extending them into the three-dimensional realm of sculpture. His early cantilevered constructions of junkyard detritus (old tires, scrap metal, steel girders) later gave way to the massive, outdoor steel sculptures for which he is known today. The title of this piece evolved loosely from the word arachnid, Greek for "spider," a creature di Suvero admired for its capacity to create structures in space. More Information
 Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, 1994-1996 stainless steel, glass, arborvitae 508 x 206 5/16 x 90 in. overall Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1996 Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham has been investigating how spaces affect human behavior, how art and audiences are connected, and how works of art are linked to their physical, social, and economic contexts. His works have included color photographs of suburban tract homes; interactive perfor-mances, films, and video installations; and glass and mirror pavilions, which he has been making for more than twenty years. For the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden he has created a large geometric maze with walls that provide both transparent and reflective surfaces. As we interact with the sculpture we both see and are seen, view the surrounding environment and our own reflections. The piece conjures up questions about inside and outside, about public and private spaces, and--as the reflective surfaces respond to the motion of clouds and sun--about nature and culture. More Information
 Selections From the Living Series, 1989 granite twenty-eight elements: 17 1/4 x 36 x 18 in. each Anonymous gift from a local resident with appreciation for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and contemporary art, 1993 Onto each of the twenty-eight white granite benches arranged symmetrically around the perimeter of a square, Jenny Holzer has engraved a different aphorism. Since the mid-1970s, using words as her artistic medium, Holzer has been disseminating her provocative messages--"truisms"--into public spaces: on posters, on stickers placed on parking meters or telephone booths, on electronic display signboards from Times Square to Caesar's Palace, and most recently, on the Internet. As the first woman artist to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990, Holzer created a memorable installation of twenty-one electronic signboards flashing messages in a babel of languages. Her sculptural installation in the Garden allows visitors a place to rest as they contemplate her cryptic, often contradictory, messages and the role that language plays in contemporary society. More Information
 Double Curve, 1988 bronze two elements: 216 x 40 x 4 1/2 in. each Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1988 While Ellsworth Kelly is perhaps best known for his abstract paintings--canvases with sharply delineated areas of bold, flat color laid out in pure geometric shapes--the sculptures he has made throughout his career explore many of the same issues regarding form and space. The two eighteen-foot, gently curving bronze arcs of Double Curve are insistently two-dimensional (viewed from the side, they almost disappear). Like the flat shapes in his paintings, they depend on their precisely controlled relationship to each other and to the surrounding area for their impact and surprising complexity. Viewing the surfaces themselves--rich brown in the morning light, stark black silhouettes in the midday sun--the arcs seem to be bending toward one another; viewing the shapes between or around the arcs, a new vibrancy of space, in rhythm with the surrounding landscape, emerges. More Information
 Junge Frau (Young Woman), 1926 bronze 50 5/8 x 14 5/8 x 12 1/4 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1958 The idealized, modern nymph who graces the Garden's central walkway, known as the "bronze allée," recalls the garden traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Georg Kolbe, who began sculpting at the beginning of this century, brought the traditions of neoclassicism to the sculpture of his day and was particularly inspired by the work of Auguste Rodin. The lyrical grace of this piece from the mid-1920s represents a highpoint in his mature style. Although some of his sculptures were banned during the Nazi era, he continued to work, but in a more acceptable, heroic style that never again achieved the rhythmic beauty of such earlier works as this one. More Information
 The Six Crystals, 1988 granite, iron 18 3/8 x 104 x 28 in. Gift of Dr. Michael Paparella, 1988 Trained as an art historian, Philip Larson turned to art-making in the early 1970s. In his sculptures andprints, he frequently incorporates geometrical patterns that are inspired by architectural forms--especially the building ornamentation of Chicago and Prairie School architects such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the bench he designed for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Larson explores progressive permutations of basic geometric forms. The cast-iron components of the piece represent the six possible combinations of four irregular diamond shapes dervied from rock crystals. Larson has also created such public projects as the walkway system for General Mills and the etched-glass transit shelters along Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. More Information
 La Grande Chiave (The Large Key), 1959 bronze 96 1/2 x 36 x 14 3/4 in. Anonymous gift, 1963 The sculptures of Giacomo Manzł are largely religious in their themes, and their graceful proportions derive from the principles of classical art. Manzł was commissioned to create the fifth door of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Entitled The Door of Death (1962), it was dedicated to the Pope, who is shown kneeling in prayer in one of the lower panels. The heavenward-directed prongs of The Large Key are actually two tall-hatted bronze cardinals, one facing forward, the other backward--an enigmatic statement of the omnipresence of the Roman Catholic Church in Italian life. More Information
 Cavaliere (Horseman), circa 1949 bronze 70 5/8 x 45 1/2 x 32 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1953 The principal subject of Marino Marini's sculpture, beginning in the 1930s and continuing throughout his long career, was the heroic theme of horse and rider. His equestrian statues evolved over the years from formal versions in the classical style, inspired by Roman and Etruscan art, to fiercely personal visions in which the rider, increasingly unable to control his mount, came to represent the human condition itself. As Marini put it: "My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. . . . My wish is to reveal the final moment of the dissolution of a myth, the myth of the heroic individual, the humanists' 'man of virtue.'" More Information
 Reclining Mother and Child, 1960-1961 bronze 90 x 35 1/2 x 52 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1963 The reclining human figure was a central theme in the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore, who used abstract forms to create powerful renderings of the human figure throughout his long and venerable career. In his archetypal organic abstraction in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, this fascination with the reclining form is wedded to another of the artist's frequent themes: the mother enclosing her child in a protective embrace. The swelling volumes of the bronze enclose equally evocative empty spaces, recalling at once both human and geological forms: the sensuous curves of the maternal figure, with its womblike cavity, and an analogous landscape of rocks and caves. The materials of Moore's sculptures--carvings in wood and stone in his earlier works, metal casts from clay or plaster forms in his later period--are integral to his explorations of subject matter. Here, he carved numerous hatchings and striations into the original plaster before casting it in bronze and gave further detail to the surface in the carefully applied patina. More Information
 Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1961 Bronze 111 x 45 1/2 x 24 in. Gift of Dayton's, 1987 Henry Moore once titled this standing figure Winged Victory. With her truncated arms and neck and elongated, protruding torso, she indeed recalls the famed Greek figure of that name. But the real inspiration for this creature was the breastbone of a bird. Moore discovered principles of form and rhythm for his sculptures in a variety of natural objects, such as rocks and plants. He had a particular fascination with bones and collected, studied, and drew them extensively to explore their complexity and dynamism. He incorporated the actual bird bone into an early maquette for this sculpture, eventually infusing its "knife-edge thinness" throughout the entire figure and retaining the rough, porous texture of bone in the work's bronze surface. Viewed from differing perspectives, the sculpture appears alternately razor sharp or rhythmically curvaceous. More Information
 Goddess With The Golden Thighs, 1964-1965/1987 bronze 84 x 150 x 42 in. overall Gift of Dolly J. Fiterman, 1987 This unnamed, archetypal goddess, with her massive, splayed thighs supported on a primitive altar of rough-hewn pillars, is a potent symbol of fertility. According to the artist, she represents "the birth of the universe." Like a number of American sculptors practicing in New York during the 1940s and 1950s, Nakian worked in a style that paralleled the development of Abstract Expressionist painting. The roughly worked, patinated surfaces of his sculptures and their fragmented, abstract forms mirror the aggressive shapes and textures that the New York School painters achieved in their canvases. Nakian forged a uniquely personal style in his sculpture, inspired by Greek and Roman art and classical mythology. More Information
 Dawn Tree, 1976 aluminum, paint 103 5/8 x 92 1/2 x 62 3/4 in. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1998 Louise Nevelson's best known and most characteristic works are the mysterious, large-scale wooden "walls" she first began making in the late 1950s. These compartmentalized assemblages of shallow wood crates, crammed with fragments of architectural ornamentation, pieces of cast-off furniture, and other found objects, were painted a uniform, flat black (and, later, white or gold). As suggested by the title of the Walker's own dramatic wall sculpture, Sky Cathedral Presence, Nevelson transformed these composites of everyday wooden bric-a-brac into imposing, altarlike presences, infused with mystery. During the 1970s, Nevelson began to make works that were more individually conceived: flowers and trees in welded aluminum. Dawn Tree is an example of one of these later works. With its collage of flattened shapes and characteristic black-painted surfaces, it recalls her earlier wall reliefs. Its smaller stature, free-standing orientation, and playful reference to nature make it a fitting addition to the Garden. More Information
 Theater Set Piece from Judith, 1950/1978 bronze 108 x 109 x 54 in. overall Purchased with the aid of funds from the Art Center Acquisition Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1978 In the years after World War II, Isamu Noguchi designed stage sets and costumes for the most advanced choreographers of the day: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and George Balanchine. This sculpture was originally an element of the stage design for Graham's 1950 Judith, a dramatization in dance of the Old Testament story in which the Hebrew widow saves Jerusalem by seducing the dreaded invader Holofernes and beheading him in his own bed. The structure in the Garden--originally made of balsa wood and recast by Noguchi in bronze nearly thirty years later--was covered with one of Graham's signature flowing cloths to form a tent at the moment of the dramatic deed. The fragile balance of the sculpture's four skeletal, weaponlike elements imparts the tense excitement of the story's dangerous scheme and recalls other of the artist's gravity-defying sculptures of the period. His 1947 pieces Avatar and Cronos, also in the Walker's permanent collection, are similar assemblages of slender elements joined together in an intricate system of balance. More Information
 Ampersand, 1987-1988 granite east column: 163 x 36 x 36 in. west column: 167 x 36 x 38 in. Gift of Margaret and Angus Wurtele, 1988 The stately pair of 14-foot stone columns that flank the main entrance to the Garden at its southern end were fashioned from a huge block of granite Martin Puryear found at the Cold Spring quarries, 75 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Puryear drove spikes into the massive stone to split it in two, and then used a machine lathe--like a pencil sharpener-- to hone each piece into its final form. One end of each column retains the block shape and rough natural surfaces of the original stone, while the other end has been shaped into a smooth, elegantly tapered conical form. Similar contrasts of form and surface appear throughout Puryear's work, in which such opposites as nature and culture, the organic and the machine-made, and primitive and modern coexist in harmony. By installing the columns in opposite directions--one on its pointed end, the other on its square base--Puryear also comments on the contrast between stability and instability and offers an intentional challenge to the formal symmetry of the southern half of the Garden. More Information
 Walking Man, 1988 bronze 72 x 36 x 30 in. Gift of the AT&T Foundation and the Julius E. Davis family in memory of Julius E. Davis, 1988 The pensive "everyman" George Segal created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was made, like all his sculpture since the 1950s, from a plaster cast formed directly on a real-life model. Segal recast the work in bronze, applied the patina by hand to impart a rich, painterly quality, and placed the figure not on a pedestal, but on a simple fragment of concrete sidewalk near one of the Garden's tree-lined walkways. Here, passing visitors are drawn to this lonely, human-scaled figure. Segal acknowledges that his walking man is linked to a long tradition of striding figures in the history of art, beginning with the Egyptian prototype and "on and on through Rodin and Giacometti." Visitors to the Walker Art Center are well acquainted with one of Segal's famed "situation" sculptures, The Diner, in which two of his unpainted plaster figures inhabit the spare confines of a real-life coffee shop. It reminds us of the deep isolation that can accompany our encounters in everyday life. More Information
 Five Plates, Two Poles, 1971 Cor-Ten steel 96 x 276 x 216 in. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1984 The title of Richard Serra's massive work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden succinctly describes the elements of its construction: two poles along the ground prop up five enormous flat plates of Cor-Ten steel. It is up to the viewer, circling around this essentially two-sided work, to discover the precarious balance of its forms (which seem to defy gravity but, in fact, are perfectly stable) and the dynamic interplay of line, space, and silhouette that are created by its composition. Serra has been exploring the properties of mass and gravity in sculpture since the late 1960s. In an early work in the Walker's own collection, for example, a 60-inch-square sheet of lead is designed to be held flat against the wall and three feet off the ground solely by means of a lead pole that leans against it. Like the best Minimalist art, Serra's sculptures, in spite of their seeming austerity, engage the viewer in intimate acts of discovery. More Information
 Amaryllis, 1965/1968 Cor-Ten steel, paint 138 x 90 x 138 in. Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1968 Tony Smith had worked as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright and was a practicing architect, designer, and painter for twenty years before turning to sculpture around 1960. Creating his monochromatic works in steel out of simple geometric forms, Smith influenced the development of Minimal sculpture--which values rational order, conceptual rigor, and clarity over expressive values and content. Amaryllis, composed of two polyhedron shapes, changes dramatically as the viewer circles it. From one perspective the two shapes appear identical and balanced; from the side view the entire structure seems ready to topple. Smith titled this work Amaryllis because the piece at first appeared rather ungainly to him, just as the amaryllis plant seemed "some terrible aberration of form. More Information
 Paul Walter's Piece, 1975 copper, creosoted wood overall 24 x 32 x 32 in. Gift of Paul F. Walter, 2000 More Information
 Belvedere, 1988 cedar 126 x 506 x 407 in. Gift of the Butler Family Foundation, 1988 A belvedere--"beautiful view" in Italian--is a structure built to command a view of its surroundings. Jackie Ferrara's stylized architectural work for the Garden holds court in the southwest corner of the grounds, where it serves as a reception, performance, and seating area for visitors as well as an object of contemplation. Ferrara's sculptures, whether tabletop sized or of grander scale, are exquisitely crafted meditations on timeless architectural forms. Here, the pylons laid out on a T-shaped floor plan suggest an Egyptian temple. The solid, elemental geometry of the piece contrasts with the delicacy of its surfaces, where complex patterns emerge from the varying lengths and shades of wood and from the play of light and shadow that embellishes the interior spaces. More Information
 Standing Glass Fish, 1986 wood, glass, steel, silicone, Plexiglas, rubber 264 x 168 x 102 in. Gift of Anne Pierce Rogers in honor of her grandchildren, Anne and Will Rogers, 1986 Ever since visitors watched its miraculous birth in the Walker's lobby--pieced together scale by scale by artisans for the exhibition of Frank Gehry's work here in 1986--the Standing Glass Fish has become a beloved icon in the city's cultural life. The 22-foot creature waited two years before being carefully disassembled and transported across the street to its permanent habitat: a fantastic lily pond among the Mexican fan palms and calamondin orange trees of the crystalline Cowles Conservatory. One of the most innovative architects practicing today, Gehry is known for using ordinary materials such as raw plywood and chain-link fencing in his boldly artistic designs. The new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the striking Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum here in Minneapolis are two recent examples of his unique architectural vision. The figure of the fish--a fond remembrance of the giant carp his Jewish grandmother would leave swimming in the bathtub each week to use for her Friday-night gefilte fish--has been a recurring motif in Gehry's work. He has used it for his whimsical lamps, in the design for a conference room, and as a notational element in his architectural drawings. More Information
 Untitled, 1996-1997 neon, glass tubing 240 x 480 in. Anonymous gift from three local residents with appreciation for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and contemporary art, 1996 Mario Merz is a leading artist of Arte Povera, a movement that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s among a group of artists dedicated to using the materials of everyday life and the natural world in their work. Igloos (made of such materials as glass, slate, or wax), spirals, the nature-related mathematical formula known as the Fibonacci sequence, and the elemental gas neon are recurring elements in Merz's art, often appearing in combination with one another. Political or literary references in neon script span the domes of his glass igloos, while the Fibonacci numbers (again in neon) spiral up the stairways of museums, as they did here at the Walker Art Center during his first American show in 1972. In the untitled piece the artist created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the words cittą irreale ("unreal city," a phrase from T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land) appear in spiralling red neon script on the side of the Cowles Conservatory, disappearing into the glass structure when the piece is unlit. More Information
Grow or Die, 2002
mixed media Purchased with funds donated by Department 56, Inc., in honor of its founder, Edward R. Bazinet and the Frederick R. Weisman Collection of Art, 2002 New York-based artist Sarah Sze creates site-specific installations from colorful domestic materials such as clothespins, plastic flowers, packing crates, aluminum stepladders, gum, and breakfast cereal. While artist-in-residence at the Walker in May 2002, she created an installation set beneath the floor in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's Cowles Conservatory. Three viewing windows offer a glimpse of a vast and magical subterranean landscape populated by fake plants, found objects, and laboratory beakers spiraling downward. Animated by artificial lighting and fans, the underground tableaux allow viewers, in Sze's words, to "discover a site similar to the way an archaeologist uncovers layers of objects, monuments, and foundations."  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1998 mixed-media installation Commissioned with Funds provided by the Medtronic Foundation. Additional support provided by the Mondriaan Foundation and the Judy and Kenneth Dayton Garden Fund, 1998 "In comparison with many other artworks, the work of Atelier van Lieshout is simple, straightforward, and is no-nonsense. It leaves much to your own imagination, you can make of it what you want. People either like the work or hate it. It's good, bad, and ugly all at the same time." --Joep van Lieshout More Information
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Arbor
Alene Grossman Memorial Arbor and Flower Garden Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988 Horticulture Features
Sculpture Pad
Alexander Calder Octopus, 1964 Alexander Calder The Spinner, 1966 Mark di Suvero Molecule, 1977-1983 Judith Shea Without Words, 1988
Spoonbridge and Cherry and Adjacent Sculpture
Magdalena Abakanowicz Sagacious Head 6 and Sagacious Head 7, 1989-1990 Barry Flanagan Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers, 1983 Charles Ginnever Nautilus, 1976 Brower Hatcher Prophecy of the Ancients, 1988 Jene Highstein Untitled, 1987-1988 Sol LeWitt X with Columns, 1996 David Nash Standing Frame, 1987 Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988
Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge and Adjacent Sculpture
Siah Armajani Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, 1988 Jacques Lipchitz Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II, 1944/1953 Jonathan Silver Wounded Amazon, 1982-1983 Richard Stankiewicz Grass, 1980-1981
Outdoor Galleries
Kinji Akagawa Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, 1987 Saul Baizerman Nike, 1949-1952 Scott Burton Seat-leg Table, 1986/1991 Deborah Butterfield Woodrow, 1988 Tony Cragg Ordovician Pore, 1989 Mark di Suvero Arikidea, 1977-1982 Dan Graham Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, 1994-1996 Jenny Holzer Selections From the Living Series, 1989 Ellsworth Kelly Double Curve, 1988 Georg Kolbe Junge Frau (Young Woman), 1926 Philip Larson The Six Crystals, 1988 Giacomo Manzł La Grande Chiave (The Large Key), 1959 Marino Marini Cavaliere (Horseman), circa 1949 Henry Moore Reclining Mother and Child, 1960-1961 Henry Moore Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1961 Reuben Nakian Goddess With The Golden Thighs, 1964-1965/1987 Louise Nevelson Dawn Tree, 1976 Isamu Noguchi Theater Set Piece from Judith, 1950/1978 Martin Puryear Ampersand, 1987-1988 George Segal Walking Man, 1988 Richard Serra Five Plates, Two Poles, 1971 Tony Smith Amaryllis, 1965/1968 Jackie Winsor Paul Walter's Piece, 1975
Cowles Conservatory and Adjacent Sculpture
Jackie Ferrara Belvedere, 1988 Frank Gehry Standing Glass Fish, 1986 Mario Merz Untitled, 1996-1997 Sarah Sze Grow or Die, 2002 |