“With the new entrance, you won’t have to head up a hill as soon as you come in,” Wilks said.
In order to make the entrance “really spectacular,” Wilks commissioned Chattanooga, Tenn.-based artist John Henry to create a 50-foot tall abstract sculpture made of red painted steel to serve as a point of entry and a tease to the kinds of work inside the park.
“It will be big enough to drive school buses through it,” Wilks said. “We’re getting a reputation and we can’t do anything half-way.”
Henry is known worldwide for his large-scale public works of art, exhibiting extensively since the early 1960s with a distinctive, recognizable trademark style.
A native of Kentucky, Henry is a noted founding member of the ConStruct Gallery, which promotes and organizes large-scale sculpture exhibitions throughout the country. A graduate of the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, Henry is also a key figure in the art scene there, and even has a Chicago street named after him.
Henry said that he’s long been aware of Pyramid Hill and has visited the park several times.
“Harry has wanted a piece of mine for along time,” he said. “When he said he wanted something for the entrance, I had a piece under construction that might work for that because of the scale that he wanted, the fact that we could make it a piece that traffic could go under.”
Henry said he is planning for a mid-June installation.
Wilks said the new entrance will be south of the current one.
Crews are already busy creating roads to connect the 70 acres he purchased to the main area of the park.
“We’ll actually have the sculpture before we’ll be able to do the blacktopping and the landscaping around it,” Wilks said. “There’s a lot we can’t do until its installed, so it will be later in the summer before we can start using the new entrance.”
The newly acquired land will include hiking trails and picnic areas, including a shelter large enough to accommodate around 50 people, Wilks said.
Wilks said the park and museum, which together include a large collection of modern and ancient art, will begin working to “fill the gap” by adding art from the Renaissance area.
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