Abington Art Center's Sculpture Park

Culture or horticulture?

Increasingly, culture heads for the exits as institutions present visual and performance art amid the beauty (and unpredictability) of nature. Sculpture Park is as much about nature as culture.

Works along the 0.6-mile path represent artists’ responses to the immediate environment, many incorporating materials that could have been gathered along the way. This can make it difficult to distinguish the art from the trees.

The similarity is no accident. “None of the sculpture is permanent,” explains a sign, “and many [pieces] are intended to join nature in their life cycles.”

Because the center is in the midst of restructuring, the park is a bit emptier than usual. Sensible visitors will know this means they should relax and flow with the experience. Insensible visitors (we know who we are) will take longer to persuade. We’re the ones who bring maps and follow them exhaustively, no matter what.

Sometimes the trees are art

But in defense of the diligent, the trailhead sign says, “Look closely — some sculpture is part of the vista, other pieces are tucked away in surprising places.” So really, how is one to know whether a particular work is hiding or has gone to that big forest in the sky?

Consistent with the “back-to-nature” ethos, works in Sculpture Park are neither numbered nor identified. I passed Mazzaroth (2010) twice before realizing the pile of burnt logs was intentional. Alison Stigora’s giant curve of charred timber looks like a campfire abandoned by Paul Bunyan.

Jeanne Jaffe’s two contributions are easier to find. The red letters and reflective cube of Fairy Tales Revisited: Mirror, Mirror (2012) stand out against the dark woodland background. Her Field of Forms (1999) is situated right near the center’s front door.

The latter is a bronze and steel gathering of organs on chest-high posts. Among them are a fine pair of kidneys and an anatomically correct heart. The collection looks like the portfolio of a transplant surgeon.

Most visible of all was Brian McCutcheon’s Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem (2004), a golden proscenium framing a forest backdrop. The title translates to the motto of William Shakespeare’s Globe Theater: “All the world’s a stage.”

And sometimes a tree is just a tree

When viewing art in nature, whether in Sculpture Park or another installation, what do you do if no art presents itself? The choices boil down to rambling on, or, as I did, repeatedly circling back to what you think you’ve missed. In retrospect, I advise against stalking: it makes the squirrels nervous.

Spying a fallen tree leaning against its neighbor, I thought I’d found Daniel Ostrov’s Levanter: A Fulcrum of Wind (2013). However, it turns out that sometimes a tipped-over tree is just a tree.

Beyond transforming art over seasons and years, the elements change the look of works moment to moment. Light shifts, breezes blow, clouds gather and suddenly, the contours and mood of a sculpture change.

For example, the day I saw John Kalymnios’s Mirror (Skyscape) (2009), the billboard-sized mirror, mounted 15 feet in the air and angled up to the sky, held a little dark cloud — the only one visible. Imagine that reflection at sunset, or edged in autumn treetops, or washed by a summer shower. Each encounter with outdoor art is new.

Since its founding in 1939 by a volunteer group of women as the Old York Road Art Guild, Abington Art Center has increased the presence of art in the community, making it easier to view, learn about, and make. It’s a mission shared by cultural institutions throughout the region, many of which are breaking through their brick-and-mortar barriers to create opportunities to encounter art less formally.

All we have to do is relax and enjoy what we see (or think we see). And lose our maps.