GARDEN OF ARTISTIC DELIGHTS
The Pittsburgh region has long offered a variety of places to take a break with nature or with art. Now there’s a venue that combines them. A new Sculpture Park has opened at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art — Ligonier Valley that is free, public — and growing.
A bonus is that it provides a setting for five sculptures and three benches by Josefa Filkosky, who died in 1999 and was widely admired personally and for her artistic accomplishments.
Previously, the closest large blending of sculpture and nature was at Kentuck Knob, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed home in Fayette County owned by British Lord Peter and Hayat Palumbo. There are 30 contemporary sculptures on the wooded grounds that visitors may access with tour admission.
SAMA Ligonier already was known for the lush floral gardens that surround the museum building. At the beginning of 2017, museum board member Ed O’Brien suggested the idea of a sculpture garden, said Kristin Miller SAMA – Ligonier Valley coordinator. “It would not have happened without him,” she said.
“We had the Josefa sculptures in storage with nowhere to show them, and we had this beautiful location.” The sculptures were in need of conservation and Mr. O’Brien had connections with Cresson Steel, Cambria County, which donated its “time and energy,” Ms. Miller said.
Carnegie Mellon University professor John Folan and his Urban Design Build Studio students took on the design of the park as a class project.
“They were fabulous,” Ms. Miller said. They superimposed images of the Filkosky sculptures onto other sculpture gardens and parks for us to see, and they created lifesized representations of each sculpture out of Styrofoam that could be easily moved about the grounds for siting.
The soaring abstract sculptures — the largest is 12 feet high and 12 feet wide — are made of steel and weigh two to four tons each. They had to be set in place with a crane.
Engineers Bob Long and Gerry Mattern (who teaches at Carnegie Mellon and is Ms. Miller’s father) designed the foundations that anchor the sculptures deeply into the ground, and they were set by Beaufort Services of Ligonier.
The final step was to paint the now-stripped steel with the colors the artist intended.
The CMU class also provided several suggestions for a path through the park and flagstone was chosen to match the log cabin style of the museum and the historic Ligonier context.
They also suggested the addition of at least two flower beds that were planted by museum gardener Anne Clark with flowers like nasturtiums that would complement the sculpture colors.
Color, for Ms. Filkosky, was
“critical,” said Ms. Miller, and the artist “left instructions for very specific codes for her paint colors.” She used oil-based Sherwin-Williams industrial paints for their outdoor durability. Ms. Miller and SAMA maintenance facilities manager Lee Rummel spent several days painting the sculptures.
“We were very careful with these colors ... [and] ...we think we matched them fairly well. As close as we could [given that paint inventories change over time].”
Ms. Miller attended Seton Hill University, where Ms. Filkosky, once a Sister of Charity, taught. Her studio was on the first floor of Ms. Miller’s residence hall, Maura.
“We talked on several occasions and I knew her work intimately. She was a very strong personality, but it was a good thing because she brought out the best in her students.” Ms. Miller said she was very honored to attend to the works’ installation. “It was kind of my gift to her.”
Maureen Vissat Kochanek, a Seton Hill assistant professor of art history, was hired by Ms. Filkosky 35 years ago. “We were professional buddies and very close friends.”
“Josefa was a fireball. She was a pioneer as far as being a female welder and sculptor. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s in southwesterrn Pennsylvania to be making that kind of art and have patrons and public acceptance was very edgy. When she was young it was more a male medium.”
Ms. Kochanek attributes some of the artist’s aesthetic choices to the precision and logic learned as an undergraduate math major. “I think we can see those characteristics in her nonobjective forms. Color and form were intricately connected.”
“Josefa was purposeful, cerebral, intelligent,” as an art educator and as an artist,” Ms. Kochanek said. “She was also a spiritual being.”
The SAMA sculptures, she said, “are invitations to feel calm and order, to be with nature, to feel quiet. We don’t do that today.”
Ms. Filkosky’s “Pipe Dream IV” was commissioned by the 1970 Three Rivers Arts Festival and is installed in Gateway Center in Downtown Pittsburgh. Two sculptures can be seen on the grounds of the Greensburg Art Center and two on the Seton Hill campus.
Also installed in the Sculpture Park are a 1994 ceramic sculpture by CMU art professor Joseph Mannino, “An Eye for Ai Yi Yi Yi Yi,” and an authentic medieval gargoyle donated by Darlene and Kurt Blodgett.
“Sculptures earlier installed on the museum grounds include “Noah’s Ark” by Ohio artist Don Drumm (2014); “River Woman” (1989) by Glenna Goodacre, who designed the obverse of the U. S. Sacagawea dollar and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and New Alexandria artist John Mayer’s “Cattails” of 2013, commissioned by the Ligonier Valley Middle School to memorialize sixth-grade student Christopher Harr.
A sculpture, “Dark Planet,” by British sculptor David Harber, has been commissioned by Ligonier native Donald Green for the park. Future plans include walking tours, outdoor events and a pavilion.
In addition, Ms. Clark will lead a free public tour of the museum’s gardens at 1 p.m. Sept. 18. For more information call 724-238-6015 or visit www.sama-art.org.