Out of the Box

By: Rebecca Dimling Cochran

April 2007

For a city traditionally considered “green,” it was strange that downtown Seattle only contained
Courtesy of Olympic Sculpture Park.

The Olympic Sculpture Park.

postage-stamp parks and squares hemmed in by large buildings. The opening in January of the Seattle Art Museum’s 9-acre waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park changed that. Now a beautifully landscaped swath of land runs three city blocks down to the shores of Elliot Bay, with elegant sculptures strategically placed throughout.

The park developed out of conversations between Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Director Mimi Gardner Gates and Virginia and Bagley Wright and Jon and Mary Shirley, trustees of the museum who generously donated many of the sculptures. Gates connected with the Trust for Public Land, which partnered with SAM to find the last undeveloped waterfront properties in downtown Seattle.

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of the architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi won an international competition to design the park. Their challenge was to connect three parallel plots, each at a different elevation and separated from one another by a busy four-lane road and an active railroad line. They connected the parcels with strategically placed bridges that give the site an overall “Z”-shaped pattern. Then they ensured the park, which is about one mile from the museum, could be entered from numerous points—along an existing bike path that runs along the waterfront, through a grove of trees that angles down to Elliot Street or via the corner of the park along Western Avenue.

Weiss and Manfredi chose this higher elevation to situate their open, airy steel-and-glass pavilion, which serves as a gathering place and houses a store, a café and restrooms. From here, visitors have a panoramic view of four swaths the architects created from native plants with the assistance of Seattle landscape architect Charles Anderson. The Valley reflects the Northwest’s forests and includes Western red cedar, hemlock, Douglas fir, sword fern and vine maple. The Grove is a dense forest of Quaking Aspen with groundcover of Oregon grape, flowering currant and Oregon iris. The Meadows are open areas covered with native grasses and wildflowers. The Shore introduces the area’s only real access to the shoreline with a pocket beach surrounded by tufted hairgrass, beach strawberry, shore pine and Nootka rose.

Among these various landscapes, SAM staff placed numerous monumental sculptures by the traditional postwar heavyweights. Ellsworth Kelly’s wall sculpture “Curve XXIV” graces the pavilion, while just outside Anthony Caro is represented by an early rusted-steel and varnish piece titled “Riviera.” The playful “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” by Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen seems to run down the hill of the West Meadow, while Alexander Calder’s bright red Surrealist sculpture, “Eagle,” is situated in the North Meadow with “Bunyon’s Chess,” Mark di Suvero’s first-ever private commission. Another di Suvero, a mobile sculpture called “Schubert Sonata,” is set to catch the wind down by the Shore. Tony Smith’s “Wandering Rocks” and his three-sided sculpture “Stinger” are both among the trees in the Aspen Grove. Across the land bridge, Beverly Pepper’s elegant bronze totem, “Persephone Unbound,” and Louise Nevelson’s “Sky Landscape I” stand sentry in the Valley. They overlook Richard Serra’s “Wake,” which seems particularly appropriate with its five inverted “S”-curved plates invoking waves or the steel hulls of ships cutting through the water.
More interesting, however, are the works created specifically for the park. Along the waterfront,
Courtesy Olympic Sculpture Park.

Teresita Fernández, “Seattle Cloud Cover,” 2004–06, laminated glass with photographic design interlay,
 and Alexander Calder, “Eagle,” 1971, steel.

furniture-maker and architect Roy McMakin has fashioned a seating area, with benches, tables and a tree, titled “Love & Loss.” Not far away, Louise Bourgeois has translated her interest in psychological themes and time into a fountain, “Father and Son.” In it, the two figures stand with hands stretched towards one another, separated by spraying water that shifts once an hour to obscure first one figure, then another. Teresita Fernández’s “Seattle Cloud Cover” is woven into the structural fabric of the trellis bridge that spans the railroad tracks. In this work, photographic images of the changing sky are laminated between two layers of glass, allowing viewers to peer through into the real sky beyond. Mark Dion has once again successfully mined the tradition of place, bringing a 60-foot-long nurse log (a decomposing trunk upon which insects and plants feed) he discovered in the Pacific Northwest into a greenhouse to recreate its rainforest environment.

Visitors are encouraged to use the microscopes and magnifying glasses supplied in the artist-designed cabinet to observe the fungi, lichen, slugs, insects and other life forms the log supports.
The park’s distance from SAM’s main facility and lack of entrance fees or fences (as stipulated in a $20 million endowment gift) creates a space that allows the art and its viewers to interact organically. And set against the sparkling backdrop of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountain peaks, could there be a better way to celebrate our love for creative expression?

Rebecca Dimling Cochran, Art & Antiques’ Atlanta correspondent, is an art critic and curator.