Urban Art Association

Took a trip to the Meijer Gardens Sculpture park yesterday and thought I'd share a bit. 

Located in Grand Rapids Michigan.  

Ranked in the top 100 most-visited art museums worldwide by Art Newspaper, the leading publication in global art news, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has grown to become an international destination. The sculpture program features more than 200 works in the permanent collection sited both indoors and outdoors on the 158-acre main campus.
The permanent collection focuses on works by established and emerging sculptors from the Modern tradition to the present. Earliest works date to the second half of the 19th century with masters such as Carrier-Belluese, Degas, and Rodin. Starting with these masters, the comprehensive presentation includes sculptors from the late 19th century to the present.
Three temporary exhibitions are also developed annually, most curated by and for Meijer Gardens. These special exhibitions are shown within the large indoor galleries and associated indoor and outdoor spaces. The sculpture exhibition program is dedicated to sculpture traditions of all periods and exhibitions have ranged from large-scale presentations of modern masters such as Rodin, Picasso, and Moore to contemporary masters such as Ai Weiwei, George Segal, Oldenburg and van Bruggen, di Suvero, Caro, and Richard Hunt.

Roxy Paine. Neuron, 2010.
Stainless steel, 492 x 528 x 624 inches
Neuron reflects ideas about nature, industry and artistic processes. It is one of Roxy Paine’s most inventive forms, extending out from a central mass. The 3,500 stainless steel rods and pipe used in this sculpture create a complex form and express a transformation from industrial to art.



Henry Moore. Bronze Form, cast 1985.
Bronze, 150 x 98 x 69 inches.
Henry Moore is recognized as the single most important figure in the history of British art during the last century and his work has been of critical importance internationally for more than sixty years. Moore’s sculpture was initially highly representational, but he gradually moved toward a vocabulary of organic, simplified forms, frequently drawn from nature.
In this piece, Moore has abstracted the human form and the shape of the sculpture changes greatly as the viewer moves around it.




I have plenty more pics to share of this visit but I'll take it easy and post more later.  

Nice thread. I travel a lot and have been running in too many cities to count. Running around a park is a great way to see the public art on display and admire it. I have just been running in Stockholm and took this - very smart piece, beautifully framed by the bucolic background (this is a short run from the city centre - stunning).

From memory, I had a great run in Kansas City as well (country club plaza). New York along the Hudson is being redeveloped, and very interesting. My 'home' run of Hampstead Heath has a few things going on too. Plus in most cities you can usually run the streets and see a few invaders, nick walkers, etc







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Another from the Meijer Gardens 

Ai Weiwei at Meijer Gardens: Natural State is his first show in the upper Midwest as well as the first of its kind for the artist at a botanical garden or sculpture park.

Ai Weiwei's Iron Tree is the artist’s largest and most complex outdoor sculpture to date. Standing at more than 22 feet tall, and measuring more than 22 feet wide, this sculpture is composed of 99 unique iron pieces cast from individual tree elements from southern China. Held together with oversize stainless steel bolts, Iron Tree appears as a living tree in form, but upon closer examination, the diversity of shapes, exaggeration of reality and awkwardness of the bolts create a much different image. Here, the very notion of bringing together unrelated parts from di erent areas to become a new unit becomes a metaphor for the complexities and complications of 21st century globalism.