Sculpturewalk has taken over the collective consciousness of most Castlegarians. With over 30 new sculptures to examine each year, this regional initiative has brought a lot of visitors to Castlegar. If you look on Facebook, you’ll find 521 responses, and you’ll note that Trip Advisor lists sculpture walk as Castlegar’s #1 tourist attraction. In fact, the website lists Castlegar as the “Sculpture Capital of Canada.”
I have no idea if there are similar cities elsewhere in Canada setting up sculpture or outdoor art displays yearly. Clearly, a few cities do commission sculptures for special events or to honour particular individuals, but no other community seems to be in the running for a second sculpture capital of Canada.
When we travel elsewhere in the world, we are always looking for displays of sculpture. Often these are available in parks and not spread throughout a city as in Castlegar. Five years ago, while in Haifa, Israel, we were following some streets down from the Baha’i Gardens when we came across a sports park. Throughout this park were statues of athletes doing their individual sports — an archer, a javelin thrower, and a discuss spinner — to name a few.
Two years ago, when we were finishing our Rotary Friendship Exchange in Iowa, we spent a few hours in Des Moines, Iowa. It had a sculpture park with about 20 avant-garde, outdoor sculptures right in the centre of the city. You could shop and then walk over to this park for a bit of artistic uplift.
Recently, while in New Jersey, we were taken to Hamilton, NJ, to visit the “Grounds for Sculpture.” Along with an interpretive centre, a museum, and a sculpture processing plant, the site had 42 treed acres housing over 300 sculptures. It was an amazing place.
The Grounds for Sculpture had a retrospective show highlighting the life and sculptures of founder and curator, Seward Johnson. Johnson was an heir to the Johnson and Johnson shampoo fortune, but he wanted to be an artist — and sculpting was his choice. We admired all of his works — and there were over 200 of them placed throughout the park.
At some point in his life, he began to sculpt what he called “familiar” pieces: everyday people doing their everyday work. Driving along the street leading into the park, we met a hitchhiker on the road edge, an outdoor worker mowing a lawn and a lady waiting at a bus stop.
In the park, these “familiar” pieces included a postman, a policeman, a hedge-clipper and a window washer, placed so we would bump into them.
In the domestic centre, we viewed four larger-than-life historic tableaux: Abraham Lincoln with a questioner; Marilyn Monroe with her dress billowing high; the famous American Gothic farm scene; and a soldier with a nurse bent over in his arms. I liked this last one the best as it was a take on Life magazine’s end of World War II photo called “Total Surrender.”
We also visited the Seward Johnson Museum where we saw Johnson’s scenes duplicating the paintings of Impressionist artists — Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, and Renoir. The figures in the scenes and some of the trappings were sculpted, and the rest of the scene was dressed in period furniture or backdrop. We walked right onto these sets and took pictures interacting with some of the characters.
To finish, we took a tram ride throughout the park and saw a display of outdoor art too numerous to describe here. It was awesome, and we have a bit of that right here in Castlegar with our own sculpturewalk