Sculpture Parks, Sculpture Gardens, and Site Specific Practices in the U.S., 1965-1991

By looking at key moments from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s when sculpture parks both explicitly and implicitly took on site-specific projects, my dissertation argues that a range of practices in American sculpture parks and gardens contributed to the development of site-specific art. I argue that site-specificity developed in response to the practice of outdoor display, first as a mode of viewing and then as an artistic practice that integrated the landscape and architectural techniques and ideas at work in the form of sculpture parks. Beginning with temporary displays staged in parks and other landscaped spaces by Minimalist artists (Robert Morris, Tony Smith, and Carl Andre), I trace the tension between artists, looking to outdoor space to support new modes of viewing and art production, and administrators and architects. If artists were reacting against the 'white cube,' then sculpture parks should have offered an alternative; instead, they functioned as the outdoor equivalent: a 'green cube.' In comparative analysis of Storm King Art Center (Mountainville NY) and the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), I show how the administrators and designers behind the institutionalization of sculpture parks sidestepped its experimental potential in working to define sculpture parks as outdoor museums. Nevertheless, site-specific practices continued to exert their own pressure, which I analyze in discussing work by David Von Schlegell and Robert Grosvenor at Storm King, and the critical response to Gordon Bunshaft's architectural design for the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden. Site-specific methods both empowered and contested the 'green cube,' a fact mirrored by the social function of these display sites as sites of both refuge and struggle, a claim I advance in relation to debates over natural resources in the case of Storm King and over the symbolic function of the National Mall's landscape in the case of the Hirshhorn. In the site-specific projects at the Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis MO) by Jackie Ferrara, Mary Miss, and Beverly Pepper, this double paradox matures as one endemic to site-specific work in sculpture parks.