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Work began this week on an as-yet untitled monumental red steel sculpture that will mark the new entrance to Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum.
“The present entrance isn’t very welcoming,” said park founder Harry T. Wilks. “It’s one-way, uphill.”
The recent acquisition of 70 additional acres adjacent to the southern border of the park, however, has allowed the relocation of the entrance to a flatter spot about a mile further south.
And the new acreage has also allowed Wilks to commission a piece of art to mark the entrance and give passers-by a sample of the kinds of arts contained therein.
The sculpture is the work of Kentucky-born, Tennessee-based artist John Henry. When it is finished, it will be composed of seven steel beams, each between 55 and 70 feet long and weighing a total of 30,000 pounds. It will be about 50 feet tall and arranged so that buses and cars can drive through it on their way in.
Henry said that he’s been creating large-scale sculpture since 1967, long before there was even a market for such things except for artists like Alexander Calder.
“There was probably no more than 10 people in the United States building over 20 feet,” he said Tuesday morning as workers and a crane operator maneuvered two of the large beams into position to be welded together. “But most of us were building pieces for exhibitions. We weren’t selling anything.”
His first commission was in 1976 for the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park at Governor’s State University in Illinois, the result of a grant from the university and the National Endowment for the Arts. It measures 134 feet long and 45 feet high and is still on display there along the ridge of a hill.
“I’ve always made sculpture because I wanted to do something interactive with the environment,” he said, “something to be a part of the landscape, and to do that, you have to participate in the scale of the landscape.”
He said that he had previously tried to get a commission for a drive-through sculpture in the Port of Miami, Fla., about 25 years ago, that would have had three lanes on either side, but there was a lot of controversy over the project and it was eventually abandoned. So this sculpture allows him to pick up that theme again.
“I feel like it’s the artist’s responsibility to interact with his or her environment,” he said. “In order to do that, you have to play with the reality of things, and doing large-scale work allows you to do that.”
Once the sculpture is installed, Wilks said that further work needs to be done on the landscaping and blacktopping before the new entrance will be open for business. He is hoping that will be done by the end of July.
The additional acreage will also allow for the construction of two new picnic areas that will seat 40-50 people each, Wilks said. One has been started already and the other should be completed sometime this summer.
“We’ll be adding new hiking trails,” he said. “There’s a creek running through the middle of the new property and the trails will be big enough to drive one of our Art Carts through.”
With the new features, Wilks said that he is planning on new signage throughout the park, and that he has ordered smaller signs to identify some of the trees along the trails to add to the educational value of the park.
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