Outdoor Art

Sculpture, installations and interventions made for the open air, from civic monuments and sculpture parks to earthworks in remote landscapes.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Outdoor Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

For most of history, art placed outdoors had a job: honouring rulers, marking graves, crowning fountains and façades. Donatello's bronze Gattamelata (1445–53) in Padua revived the equestrian monument, and the gardens of Versailles lined their avenues with mythological statuary. Weather decided the materials: bronze, granite, hard limestone.

In the 20th century outdoor work increasingly stood for itself. Sculpture parks, from Storm King in New York State, founded in 1960, to the garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, set large abstract pieces against lawns and hills. Land artists went further. Robert Smithson built Spiral Jetty (1970) into Utah's Great Salt Lake, and Walter De Maria planted 400 steel poles in New Mexico for The Lightning Field (1977). Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped buildings and ran fabric across landscapes for a few weeks at a time, and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) cut a polished black wall into the ground.