Sculpture Park
The DeCordova Sculpture Park encompasses 35 acres of beautiful rolling woodlands and lawns, and is the largest park of its kind in New England (see Park Map). The Sculpture Park provides a constantly changing exhibition of large-scale, outdoor, Modern and contemporary American sculpture and site-specific installations for 125,000 visitors each year. The Sculpture Park is open to the public every day of the year from dawn 'til dusk, and contains approximately 75 artworks at any given time. (see Park Artists).
The original twenty-two acre Lincoln estate of Julian and Elizabeth Dana de Cordova was heavily wooded. A long, winding drive led from Sandy Pond Road past a large Carriage House and barn to a brick mansion built in the early 1900s on the highest point of the property overlooking Flint's Pond. The DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park was established in 1948 as a result of the bequest of Julian de Cordova (d. 1945), and first opened to the public in 1950.
Today, the Carriage House has become art studios, classrooms, and administrative offices for theDeCordova Museum School, and the "castle" (as the mansion was called) has been transformed into galleries for a museum of modern and contemporary American art. Over the years since the Museum's founding, parts of the property were cleared, additional acreage acquired, and occasional sculptures were placed outdoorsÑusually to complement exhibitions on view in the galleries. During the 1960s, DeCordova organized several important outdoor sculpture exhibitions that were designed to introduce audiences to vital new directions in large-scale Modernist sculpture then evolving. A 1966 exhibition, for example, included significant works by Alexander Calder, George Rickey, Max Bill, and Alexander Liberman.
In 1985, a curatorial program was established to provide for the permanent, rotating exhibition of contemporary American outdoor sculpture and site-specific installations. The early success and significance of this ongoing program was formally recognized in 1989 when the Museum's public name was changed to The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
The DeCordova Sculpture Park now occupies over 35 acres, and operates with a three-tier exhibition program:- The first tier consists of outdoor sculpture from the DeCordova Permanent Collection. These works are few in number, and tend to include 20th century sculpture by historically significant artists such as George Rickey, Alexander Liberman, and Nam June Paik.
- The second tier, which makes up the bulk of work in the Sculpture Park, is comprised of large-scale outdoor sculptures borrowed by DeCordova from artists, dealers, museums, and private collectors. Several sculptures rotate in and out of the Sculpture Park each year. Artists currently participating in this loan program include Ursula von Rydingsvard, William Tucker, Mark diSuvero, Sol LeWitt, Chakaia Booker, and Jim Dine.
- The third tier is made up of site-specific, temporary, long-term (approximately 1 - 5 years) outdoor sculptures and installations designed by artists expressly for specific sites in the Sculpture Park. These include works by Steven Siegel, Ronald Gonzalez, Kitty Wales, Carlos Dorrien, and Rick Brown.
Power Structures
March 24, 2009- September 7, 2009
Power Structures features Permanent Collection photographs that take the infrastructure of modern civilization as their subject to explore the effects of the built environment on our perception of and experience with the land and our physical surroundings. Photographers on view includeBremner Benedict, Walter Crump, Harold Edgerton, Phillip Jones, Nicholas Nixon, Gary Metz, and Edward Steichen. This exhibition is organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik.
The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art
June 6, 2009 – September 7, 2009
This summer DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum hosts the award-winning traveling show The Old, Weird America, the first museum exhibition to explore the widespread resurgence of folk imagery and mythic history in recent art from the United States. Organized by Toby Kamps, Senior Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the exhibition illustrates the relevance and appeal of folklore to contemporary artists, as well as the genre's power to illuminate ingrained cultural forces and overlooked histories. The exhibition borrows its inspiration and title—with the author's blessing—from music and cultural critic Greil Marcus' 1997 book of the same title that examines the influence of folk music on Bob Dylan and The Band's seminal album, The Basement Tapes.
The Old, Weird America was the recipient of a prestigious award from the International Art Critics Association: Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally, 2008. This exhibition is also the largest in the history of DeCordova, filling all of its indoor galleries.
The Old, Weird America features eighteen artists who explore native, idiomatic, and communal subjects from America's past: Eric Beltz, Jeremy Blake, Sam Durant, Barnaby Furnas, Deborah Grant, Matthew Day Jackson, Brad Kahlhamer, Margaret Kilgallen, David McDermott and Peter McGough, Aaron Morse, Cynthia Norton (a.k.a. Ninny), Greta Pratt, David Rathman, Dario Robleto, Allison Smith, Kara Walker, and Charlie White. Covering the period from the first Thanksgiving in 1621 to the beginning of the Space Age in 1957, their representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, installations, and videos reconsider important legends and figures in United States history. Indians, Pilgrims, Founding Fathers, cowboys, Civil War widows, bobby soxers, and Depression-style drifters are among the Ur-American characters populating storytelling works that – like all good folklore – recklessly combine myth and fact to suggest an alternative national history.
During times of change and social stress, cultures look to their master narratives. For example, in the United States, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and other artists in the Regionalist movement of the 1930s and 40s rejected abstract, European Modernism and turned their attention to depicting rural and domestic life in realist styles, in part as a reaction against the horrors of that continent's First World War. Similarly, says exhibition curator Kamps, “in this post-9/11 America of high-emotion and sweeping change, artists naturally look for inspiration in the forgotten and unresolved relics of our nation, the volatile and mercurial old, weird America of folk history.†Included in the exhibition are renowned works, such as: Kara Walker's animated, Balinese-style shadow-puppet video, 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005), a fearless satire of black origin myths and white racism in outrageous vignettes featuring slave ships, gay master-and-slave sex, and dancing cotton-boll babies; Sam Durant's sculptural installation Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching (2006) restages two amateurish dioramas from the defunct Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts juxtaposing two radically different versions of how the Jamestown Colony came to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in 1621; Margaret Kilgallen's installation Main Drag (2001) depicts, in a playful, cartoon-like style, a low-rent town of the imagination inhabited by surfers, hobos, juvenile delinquents, and dames in beehive hairdos; Barnaby Furnas's paintings and watercolors express the chaos and confusion of battle, and works on view such as John Brown (2005) feature glowing blood, explosions, and tracer bullets as well as representations of time-lapse movement reminiscent of film and videogame special effects; Jeremy Blake's digitally composed video Winchester (2002), inspired by the labyrinth-like house of rifle heiress Sarah Winchester, morphs vintage photographs of the house, mysterious cowboy shadows, and Blake's own abstract “digital paintings†to create a lush, engulfing image of a uniquely American form of madness.
The Old, Weird America has been made possible by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston patrons, benefactors, and donors to its exhibition fund and by the generous support from Union Pacific and Nina and Michael Zilkha. Its appearance at DeCordova is made possible by Trustee and Overseer support of DeCordova's Fund for the Future.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 162-page, full-illustration catalog published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that will provide a cultural and historical context for the artworks. The publication include essays by Kamps, the show's curator; Colleen Sheehy, Director of Education at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum and art historian at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; and Michael Duncan, a critic and curator based in Los Angeles. It also contains reproductions of the exhibited work, as well as biographical and bibliographical information on each artist. This catalog was made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc.
