Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Apr. 14--It's spring and there's no better time to venture outside into a museum.
That's what planners had in mind 10 years ago when internationally known artist Barbara Kruger spelled out "PICTURE THIS" in giant letters between the N.C. Museum of Art's red brick building and amphitheater stage. And slowly, the 160 or so acres surrounding the museum have been turning into both a park and an outdoor gallery.
Based more on the European concept of wild sculpture gardens than a municipal park, the museum land received its most recent artwork this month: a 20,000-pound tower of recycled newspapers. Another sculpture was installed in January.
Those pieces join art that has gone up over the past few years, connected by a network of new walking and biking paths that also hook up the museum park with the city of Raleigh's greenway system. The paths brought in hundreds more park visitors last year and are starting to do the same again, now that the weather has warmed up.
Little by little, the park has turned into a design element in its own right, connecting the West Raleigh museum to its neighbors and inviting a broader participation from the community at large.
Daniel P. Gottlieb, the museum's deputy director for planning and design, calls it "an extended hand to the community." He says this will be one way to bring in a more diverse audience than traditional museum hounds. Plus, he says, research shows that everyone loves a park.
Into the wild
Linda Dougherty, the museum's contemporary art curator, begins a tour of the park grounds at the Joseph M. Bryan Jr. Amphitheatre. This spot, not far from the museum's front door, is where summer concerts and movies are presented. And it's the first connection to the natural world.
"It kind of becomes wilder and wilder as you move away from the building," Dougherty says.
A five-minute stroll away, the trailhead is near the overflow parking lot on Blue Ridge Road. It's a good place to pick up a map that tells you what you're looking at. You'll read that the benches, bike racks and informational signs along the paths are made of metal bars salvaged from the youth prison that was the museum's neighbor until a couple of years ago.
One of the first things you'll see is "Wind Machine," a 2002 work of found objects by Vollis Simpson that twirls atop a 35-foot pole, with real horses grazing nearby. Then you'll walk through the three-ringed monumental piece by Raleigh sculptor Thomas Sayre from 1999, titled "Gyre."
At the point where you can stay on the paved trail or take a mulched path into the woods, you'll find the first of this year's installations. With "Crossroads," Martha Jackson-Jarvis had broken-up bricks from the Polk Youth Correctional Facility sent to her Washington, D.C., studio, where she fashioned them into a slender, towering piece that also comprises carnelian and Italian glass tile. She had it trucked back to Raleigh.
"Crossroads" refers to the tall smokestack that is the only remnant of the prison and can be seen in the distance. "It echoes the history of this place," Dougherty says.
That sculpture was installed in January, and the artist will be at the museum on April 23 to talk about it and her other work, which includes ceramic and mosaic pieces that have been exhibited throughout the country.
Earth and sky
The landscape drops and rises, and soon the traffic from the nearby interstates is a faint hum that reinforces the sense of a serene pocket in an urban environment.
The mulch path leads into the woods to the latest installation, New York artist Steven Siegel's giant, turretlike stack of newspapers. Siegel and a team of volunteers folded and nailed the papers around a split gum tree and two-by-fours in about two weeks, finishing on April 6.
This piece, like others Siegel has done, are meant to gradually biodegrade, changing shape as they return to the earth -- a natural selection for a park museum.
"He takes something so ordinary and transforms it by sheer accumulation," Dougherty says.
Siegel doesn't name his pieces until they're finished, and this one has not yet been titled.
Past Siegel's work, the trail eventually comes to "Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky," British artist Chris Drury's 2003 installation. The stone chamber poses an invitation to open the door and venture into the darkness, where if you sit quietly and patiently, the interior walls reveal something surprising, thanks to the pinhole camera effect in its roof.
Beyond that, a new trail loops back through a prairie with native grasses and wildflowers and comes around to last year's fanciful work of woven maple and sweet gum saplings by local artist Patrick Dougherty -- our guide's husband -- called "Trail Heads," which is a popular attraction for children.
More on the horizon
The idea is that the park will keep changing with new installations and programs. Specially trained park docents will soon be at work. Backpacks with educational games tied to the park are already available for free inside the museum from the Collection Connection learning center.
One of the biggest projects on the horizon is the remaking of a big retention pond at the western edge of the grounds. Working with N.C. State University, the museum will turn it into a stormwater management demonstration project -- perfect for biology field trips -- and a significant piece of environmental art.
Acclaimed landscape artist Mary Miss of New York will turn science into art in an as-yet undefined plan. Specifics are on hold until the museum's expansion plans are firmed up. The museum is waiting on funding from the state but expects to begin construction this year on a new building.
Those design plans will be unveiled this summer. A memo recently circulated among museum board and staff members indicates that the new building will be a modern, minimalist structure of about 90,000 square feet, rectangular-shaped and made of stainless steel and glass.
Five large gardens will be on two sides of the building, enclosed in glass that can be illuminated. The roof will be stainless steel with hundreds of "skylight eyes" to filter natural light into the galleries below. At night, lights will create "a mysterious and elegant rooftop landscape," according to the memo.
Gottlieb has described the new building as one that will give visitors a sensory connection to the outside world, a way to overcome the fatigue of moving from space to space inside a building and reinforcing the connection with the parkland outside.
Linda Dougherty, who walks daily on the park's trails, says she often overhears people talking about the sculpture outdoors.
"That happens so rarely inside the museum," she says. "My hope is they'll be drawn inside."
-----
Copyright (c) 2006, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.
