Sculpture Gardens | Finding Balance

Take a step into three sculpture gardens in America that feature monuments from notable regional, wildlife and Western artists.

By James D. Balestrieri

We often talk about harmonizing the human-made with the natural world, but the harmonies we claim to achieve, in truth, rarely work out or don’t seem to last. Our notions of what works with nature change—they are, after all, just notions; nature changes as well. An exception to this, which we often take for granted, is the sculpture garden. You know, those spaces tacked on to museums and tucked away on the university grounds or off on their own in some gorgeous spot. They often take me by surprise. If I find myself in a sculpture garden, my heart rate drops and the old blood pressure levels out. Something opens in my mind and soul. Perhaps they open together. I’m not a theologian or a physiologist, but to get a real sense of the serenity of the sculpture garden, I need only imagine its genesis, thousands of years ago, when monoliths of various sorts stood in sacred spaces out of doors, spaces filled with meaning. When I find myself in a sculpture garden, I cross over, in a way, from the aesthetic to the spiritual, enjoying an experience that dates back almost as far as human culture stretches.

Looking at just three of the many sculpture gardens in the United States—the Benson Sculpture Garden in Loveland, Colorado; Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina; and the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park on San Juan Island in Washington state—we can observe how each of them strike a careful balance between nature and sculpture, a balance designed to reset and recenter the imagination of the strolling visitor.

What began in the 19th century as a Colorado homestead farmed by the Benson family became in 1961, when the family donated part of their land to the City of Loveland, a protected wetlands and bird sanctuary. In turn, it became the Benson Sculpture Garden in 1984, after five area sculptors—George Lundeen, Dan Ostermiller, George Walbye, Fritz White and Hollis Williford—came up with the idea of hosting a sculpture show there. To this day, the annual Sculpture in the Park, hosted by the Loveland High Plains Council, raises funds to help with the preservation of the garden and the acquisition of new works.

STRENGTH OF THE MAKER, a monumental bronze by Denny Haskew, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, takes the viewer back to the devotional origins of the sculpture garden, balancing spiritual power with physical beauty. According to Haskew, STRENGTH OF THE MAKER epitomizes the core of his beliefs in the strength and power of the natural world, a world in which everything connects to everything through the spirit. As he says, “beings of greatness [are] important. I feel they all exude the same message: a life of oneness, love, honesty and a source of emotional strength. STRENGTH OF THE MAKER is my visual version of how I see my Maker.”

With a different kind of strength and beauty, Adam Schultz’s MORNING FLIGHT not only balances the animal and geological worlds, but it also unites disparate media—bronze and stone—to create an artwork that remains firmly bound to the earth while also soaring above it, defying those very bounds. As the stylized hawk glides and hunts, it casts its shadow on the rock, tying the elements, earth and air, to one another.

Loveland native Lundeen’s work PRAIRIE FLOWERS goes even further, by uniting the bronze sculpture with the flower garden. The young woman holding her basket surveys the flowers all around her, thinking about which ones she might pick and lay in her wicker basket. She, in effect, is one of us, another visitor, appreciating both the garden and the calm.

Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina is the nation’s first public sculpture garden; it also boasts the most comprehensive collection of American sculpture anywhere. Born out of the vision of celebrated sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband, Archer, Brookgreen was founded in 1931 with three aims: “First, to collect, exhibit and preserve American figurative sculpture; second, to collect, exhibit and preserve the plants of the Southeast; and third, to collect, exhibit and preserve the animals of the Southeast.”

Huntington’s FIGHTING STALLIONS surmounts the fountain at the garden entrance. With one rider already thrown and the other perched precariously on the horse at right, the work is a muscular reminder of both the primacy and the primal power of nature. Huntington, it should be noted, was highly successful, earning public commissions and critical acclaim at a time when few women thrived in the plastic arts and was especially proficient at depicting animals with scrupulous realism and dynamic form.

THE HUNGRY LOOP, a monumental 2012 bronze by Herb Mignery, is a poignant homage to the Black cowboys who worked and roamed the American West, many of them, as the one seen in this work, making the rounds of ranches and the rodeo circuit in hopes of earning a meager wage. Born into a historic ranch family, Mignery knows the hardship of the itinerant cowboy and the lonely harshness that can arise out of the natural world as he makes his way, from job to job. The way that the cowboy, on his horse, seems about to step off the pedestal, attests to the artist’s skill at capturing the drifting spirit of the moment.

T.D. Kelsey’s bronzes always seem to find that crucial balance between classical form and modern movement, and the rider and bucking bronco that comprise TOUCHIN’ THE SUN are no exception. It’s a work you want to walk around, to see in three dimensions against the backdrop of the gardens and sky, and in different light. At just the right time of day, you might even see an optical illusion of the hat touching the rising or setting sun.

And that’s a big part of the point of sculpture gardens—moving around the artworks, bearing witness to them as the clouds move, the light changes, as the seasons change, as the sculptures themselves weather. The calm we feel has a great deal to do with the slowing down of time, of our awareness of time’s passage, and our passage through time.

North of Seattle, south of Vancouver, and just this side of the Canadian border, the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park is an island on an island. What could be better than that for the weary, far-too-connected soul? Opened in 2001 and featuring some 150 artworks by 90 artists, the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park is, like nature herself, a work in progress, adding to its collection on a regular basis. The sculptures here are more contemporary in form and are thoughtfully and boldly integrated with their surroundings.

Tom Small’s magnificent ENTRY frames the gardens and other works in the park in myriad ways as viewers move through and around it. It appears it might be a futuristic vision of a trilith, a portal into a vanished temple to a forgotten god. Joe Treat’s whimsical horse PICKLES is made from the sorts of weathered posts that horses get tethered to all the time. It is as if the horse, left too long, has transformed. In FORGED BOUNDARIES, Jim McLuen suspends migratory salmon below an undulating river surface. Like a child’s mobile, the fish move in unison, tied to the current that drives them upstream.

Lastly, with SOUNDHENGE, Derek Learned and Dale Easterly add the aural to the visual, inviting visitors to take mallets to the various elements in the piece and create a soundscape. Adding music to the sounds of nature (and of other visitors), balancing music with the murmur of wind, the songs of birds, the rustle of animals and the silences in between, SOUNDHENGE returns us, yet again, and in a different way, to that first, primordial space, the one that blended the human and the natural in order to approach the divine.

I’m betting there’s a sculpture garden no more than a stone’s throw or short drive from wherever you are right now. Here’s my challenge: Find it. Take a walk. See if I’m right about the heart rate and blood pressure. Feel time slow down. Slow. Slower.

Benson Sculpture Garden2908 Aspen DriveLoveland, CO 80538

Brookgreen Gardens1931 Brookgreen DriveMurrells Inlet, SC 29576

San Juan Islands Sculpture Park9038 Roche Harbor RoadFriday Harbor, WA 98250

This story appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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