A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held today for "Brushwood Dance: An Art Installation by W. Gary Smith," a nationally known artist and landscape architect, at Garvan Woodland Gardens.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony for Smith's art installation will be held at 2 p.m. today at the botanical garden, with a reception following in the Garvan Pavilion.
Smith arrived Sunday to begin the installation process and has continued to lead the process by utilizing staff and volunteers to help craft the massive art installation piece, which will be on display through spring 2017 and will be incorporated into the gardens' seasonal displays such as Holiday Lights and Tulip Extravaganza.
The 450-foot-long installation, composed of natural materials, primarily saplings and branches, is serpentine in shape and will wind along Warren's Woodland Walk, ripple along rock walls, arch over trails and undulate through the bulb meadow to its crescendo at The Three Sisters of Amity Daffodil Hill, a news release said.
"One of our missions is to protect and preserve the woodland forest of Garvan Woodland Gardens and natural materials is one of the hallmarks of a lot of the things that we do in the gardens," said Becca Ohman, garden director.
"Gary has an extensive background working almost exclusively with botanical gardens and also as a professor of landscape architecture and those two skill sets blended together were a really natural fit for the garden. We are a university-owned garden and it's a unique environment, and he brought both types of materials and style of art that would be highlighted well in the garden and the unique perspective from his professional experience as well."
"Brushwood Dance -- dance is a really important part of the name, because I've been designing gardens for 30 years now and one of the things that I've learned is the two art forms that have the most in common among all art forms are garden design and dance," Smith said.
"Both of those arts are all about human movements through space over time, and those three elements -- human movement, through space, and over time -- are shared by garden design and dance and no other art form that I can think of has those three elements.
"Not painting, not sculpture, not architecture -- dance and garden design are very closely connected, and this particular environmental artwork, because it's 450 feet long and winds its way through the woods and in and among the trees, really is like a dance. I would actually love to see a performance of modern dance interacting with this piece. I think it would be really cool."
As a member of the American Public Garden Association for 37 years, Smith met Ohman at a conference where they immediately "hit it off," he said, and in 2015, after two days of intensive planning meetings with the garden's horticulture and operations crew, the vision for the piece was developed.
"I work in botanical gardens all over the U.S. ... and I think the two most important issues in botanical gardens right now are audience development and donor development. We're always looking for new ways to attract new audiences," Smith said.
"One of the ways the public gardens across the county bring in new audiences is through artwork and particularly environmental artwork. Everybody's putting in children's gardens now, or family gardens, for the same reason -- looking for ways to bring new kinds of audiences to the garden."
Local on 04/29/2016