Sculpture-Adjacency: A Challenge Facing Sculpture Park Permanent Collections

Abstract

The number and variety of sculpture parks has grown steadily since the 1960s, when the first entries into this unique typology were founded. As early entrants to the field, sculpture parks founded between 1960 and 1990 have developed ways to stay relevant and attract new audiences by leveraging the asset of their parkland and producing seasonal entertainments and special exhibitions. The enticing combination of these offerings can overshadow permanent collections, the primary reason for their existence. This article explores the challenge sculpture parks face in activating the important asset that is their permanent collection, a problem that has multiple causes. Sculpture parks are not able to rotate their collection, an established museological method for giving the collection new life. This inability produces a static sameness for visitors. The tours that are on offer tend to be in the traditional museum-as-expert mode instead of visitor-centric. Deepening this predicament is the reality that sculpture park curation and programming are sculpture-adjacent, a term I use to signify their vague relationship to the sculptures. Drawing on research from the field of visitor engagement and museum education, this article argues that sculpture parks should turn to visitor-centric programs as the principal method to bring permanent collections to life.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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20 Dewey, “Art as Experience,” 47.

21 Dewey, “Art as Experience,” 60. Emphasis original.

22 Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 10. Emphasis original.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tola Porter

Tola Porter is an art historian and museum educator. She is the museum educator for Academic and Public Programs at the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum where she is involved in activating the university’s campus art collection. Tola served as the Mark S. Weil and Joan M. Hall professional development fellow in the Curatorial Department at Laumeier Sculpture Park. She earned a PhD in art history from Washington University in St. Louis, an MA in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and an MA in arts administration from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Modernism as Public Art: Awakening Social Agency in Abstract Public Sculpture, 1950–1980,” evaluates the function and resonance of nonfigurative public sculpture from the mid-to-late twentieth century.