Wonder as you wander through seven amazing sculpture gardens
Have you ever visited Golden Gate Park to see a woman with a living beehive on her head? Or toured a Sonoma winery with 200-plus acres of museum-quality artwork? These are options in the Bay Area, where gorgeous sculpture gardens abound. Here are seven great ones to explore:
Point San Pablo Harbor
Richmond
Where do Burning Man sculptures go after the party’s over? Many have a second home on a remote spit of Richmond’s coast.
Candace Locklear in Oakland helped create We Are From Dust to get Burning Man art off the desert and into public areas. “A lot of artists we know have work stuck in old warehouses, and it’s just a shame,” she says.
At Point San Pablo Harbor, there’s an “Asterpod” womb you climb into and a tree sculpture by Kate Raudenbush transported all the way from New York. “It’s so immense, and there was nowhere to put it,” Locklear says. “So she was like, ‘I’ll give it to you!’”
Sculptures that light up at night include a glass crocodile, a huge bee and a pair of interactive cats. Everything’s meant to be physically explored.
“The cats actually purr when you touch a certain place on them,” Locklear says.”They will vibrate.”
The allure of the space is enhanced by the presence of wildly popular Black Star Pirate BBQ, plus a waterside bar with a deck and music, dancing and movies. “People come knowing they can meet like-minded people and feel comfortable,” says Locklear. “It’s become a miniature Burning Man experience.”
de Young Museum
For a sensorial experience, nothing much beats the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. You’re among the butterflies and vegetation of Golden Gate Park, but the art itself also seems to breathe nature.
Visitors enter James Turrell’s “Three Gems” through a tunnel that opens up into a chamber carved out of a hill. The attraction is simple but sublime: You look up at the sky through a hole in the ceiling. Sit a while, and you’ll grow to appreciate the effects weather and time have on natural light, which is subtly enhanced by hidden LEDs.
“Exomind (Deep Water)” by Pierre Huyghe is a crouching female figure whose head is turbaned with honeycomb and swarming bees. It speaks to the brain’s neural network and also climate change: If we don’t have honeybees on our minds, we could destroy the pollination apparatus sustaining our food system. The piece’s growing wax ball needs to be “trimmed” occasionally — how often can you say that about modern art?
Then there’s Zhan Wang’s “Artificial Rock.” “This sculpture alludes to the jiashanshi (artificial mountain rocks) commonly placed in Chinese gardens,” says Emma Acker, associate curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Wang’s shiny stainless-steel rock, which mirrors the viewer but is hollow, alludes to the emptiness of manmade simulations of nature in Beijing’s modern urban landscape.”
Other artworks include a giant safety pin by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and a self-portrait/war statement by Bay Area Funk Art’s Robert Arneson. For folks who want to keep the naturalistic vibes going, there’s the Japanese Tea Garden next door, with its animal sculptures, lovingly manicured gardens and grassy matcha drinks.
Stanford University Stanford
You can’t navigate Stanford’s campus without bumping into prolific public art. Perhaps most intriguing is the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, with dozens of pieces reflecting traditional culture and creation myths. Anthropology grad student Jim Mason built it with artists from the Pacific country’s Sepik River region in the 1990s; the carved-wood and pumice sculptures remain a popular hangout spot for college students today.
There’s a garden full of Auguste Rodin sculptures open around the clock with free tours. It celebrates, according to the university, the artist’s “relentless pursuit to convey complex emotions, diverse psychological states and pure sensuality through the nude.”
Contemporary works are always popping up, too. “Pars pro Toto” presents stone spheres, sourced from eight nations, that range from watermelon-sized to something that could flatten Indiana Jones. Artist Alicja Kwade chose their location by tossing marbles onto a model of the campus. Xu Zhen’s “Hello,” meanwhile, must have one of the most disingenuously disarming titles in the art world — the 15-foot sculpture looks like a coiled bloodworm poised to sink into the flesh of a passing student.
Napa
The world’s tallest filing cabinet is right here at di Rosa, rising seven stories high, thanks to artist Samuel Yates. (The drawers are full of shredded car parts — don’t ask, it’s art.)
The di Rosa center has more than a thousand similarly thought-provoking pieces scattered over 217 acres in Napa Valley. The focus is modern Northern California art with works from the 1960s onward and space devoted to up-and-coming artists, often from the Bay Area.
“Driving up to di Rosa, it is impossible to miss Mark di Suvero’s monumental sculpture ‘For Veronica,’ which was named in tribute to (art patron) Veronica di Rosa,” says Andrea Saenz, the center’s deputy director. “And I always like to point out Robert Arneson’s large ceramic bust of Viola Frey. These two sculptures speak to the friendships formed at the art park and to the collaborative spirit that remains integral to the organization today.”
There’s a herd of hands rising from the earth and a motorized angel helicoptering in the air. William Wiley’s “Gong” is a massive metal instrument that visitors pound with a wooden caber (surprisingly, the geese in the nearby lake don’t seem to mind the soul-shaking sound). There’s even more artwork on distant Milliken Peak, which can be accessed during 3-mile tours held monthly.
Appreciating the sculpture is just one thing to do at di Rosa. “There is fantastic birding, picnic areas and wonderful, rugged walking paths to enjoy,” Saenz says. “Not to mention guided hikes with sweeping vistas and a gorgeous courtyard lawn on which to lounge. The di Rosa is a terrific spot for a romantic picnic, a family get-together or a play date.”