Sculpture Park
The old A-1 Tow Yard near Barstow was the location of the Tired Iron Museum, a display of homemade terminator vehicles built by Ed and Greg Parker. The Parker family owned and operated an auto repair and towing shop here, and created these functional desert art cars mostly out of breakdowns and...
The undeveloped Albany Dump peninsula (also called Fleming Point and "the Bulb") is composed of fragments of the urban landscape dumped into the Bay up until 1984. Chunks of concrete, twisted metal, piles of shingles, and other debris are visible like a sort of geologic stratigraphy on the steep...
This American landmark, composed of ten vintage Cadillacs buried nose-first in a field outside Amarillo, was originally installed in 1974. It was conceived by a group of artists and automobilists known as Ant Farm (Chip Ward, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michaels), and it was funded and "seen...
The Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in West Rutland is an active art production site, located at a large, long-shuttered Vermont Marble production plant. Most of the buildings are leased to other companies, but the Carving Studio occupies a few of the more picturesque old ones, and installs...
Cathedral Canyon is a small natural canyon which has been transformed into a rambling grotto of icons, statues, and text panels. Religious in overall tone, the site has many secular elements as well, and, though untended, is open to the public. It is best viewed at night, when the multicolored...
The town of Marfa, at the southern edge of West Texas, has been transformed by the presence of the artist Donald Judd, who established the Chinati Foundation there, along with his residence and studio complexes. Judd, who died in 1994, was an internationally known minimal artist, who turned more...
A dinosaur park consisting of 11 large fiberglass dinosaurs constructed by a single individual, Donald Bean, a retired carpenter. Opened in 1981, the park is located behind his house in the small community of Moscow.
The 109 giant ears of corn on a lawn in an office park near the town of Dublin is a project conceived by the artist Malcolm Cochran, in 1994, for the Dublin Arts Council. It makes a statement about the transition of much of Ohio's landscape from farms to suburbs. The site, once owned by an...
The Garden of Eden is a half-acre lot in a small Kansas town, transformed over the years with elaborate sculptures, towers, and furnishings, starting in the early 1900's by its owner, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor. The sculptural park, now owned by Garden of Eden, Inc., is part Populist political...
Local resident Emil Gehrke once made numerous decorative windmills from scrap. As he is now deceased, his collection sits in a fenced enclosure in a roadside park near Grand Coulee.
A religious shrine built by a Catholic priest, the site consists of a network of paths, grottos, and caves covered in stones and shells. The original builder, Father Dobberstein, worked on the site for over 40 years, before his death in 1954. Another priest, Father Louis H. Greving, has since taken...
A quarter-mile long dirt road that is lined with scupltures and stones inscribed with the quips and witticisms of its maker, Duane Williams, also known as "Doobie" (for obvious reasons, we are told), also known as The Guru. Features include the Desert Broadcast Imagination Station, a hut fashioned...
A museum and gallery made over 20 years by a retired surveyor named Howard Taylor. Religious themes are explored through the medium of natural stone and rocks collected, arranged, and painted by Taylor.
A sculpture park built by the artist Noah Purifoy, made primarily out of scavanged and donated materials. The artist has been at work on this 2.5 acre site since 1989.
A museum and shrine, consisting of an assemblage of artifacts in a maze of display areas, built by one man to celebrate his notions of good health and happiness, loosely centered around oranges. The creator, Jeff McKissack, a retired postman, died in 1979, but the Orange Show Foundation, funded by...
The sculpture garden and home of the folk artist and Baptist preacher Howard Finster.
A picturesque ghost town in southern Nevada, in the Bullfrog gold mining district, with a split identity as a contemporary sculpture park. The ghost town has a number of multi-story facades still standing from the heyday of the town, which was around 1910, when the population was near 10,000 (the...
Richart, aka Dick Tracy, lives in a normal looking house on a busy street corner in Centralia. Surrounding this normal house however, is a dense garden of spires, walls, and alcoves, and other sculptural forms that he has fashioned from wood, styrofoam, metal, and other debris.
A religious grotto and cave built by Father Philip J. Wagner. Started in the 1920's, work on the site continued until his death in 1959. The Cave of Wonder enters a thousand feet into a hill side, and while it is claustrophobic at times, it opens out into a two story chamber with a near life-size...
An unusual compound built by the flamboyant Eddie Owens Martin, who was subjected to commanding visions, such as the one that told him to build this personal retreat and sanctuary, and to call himself Saint EOM. He created a religion called Pasaquoyanism, a blend of Pre-Columbian, Native American,...
A complex of sculptures and hand-made structures, made from debris found in the area (car parts, bottles, wheels, railroad ties, etc.), and held together in a matrix of concrete. Built between 1967 and 1975, by a man named Rolling Mountain Thunder, who lived in the site for many years, and who...
Forty years worth of carving and "tinkering" by the owner of this property, a man named Ross Ward, created the more than 12,000 carved objects and kinetic dioramas, including a Western town, and a circus. Tinkertown, a museum he made with his wife, over those years became a 22 room rambling hand...
An unusual park filled with "totem poles" and other sculptures and tower structures, built by Ed Galloway, as a sort of homage to Native Americans.
Lots of interesting outdoor art.
A major collection of outdoor sculpture on the campus of Western Washington University. The collection has some pieces which qualify as "land art" including Alice Aycock's 1987 "The Islands of the Rose Apple Tree Surrounded by the Oceans of the Word, for You, Oh My Darling," and Nancy Holt's 1977-...
A park full of life-size and larger than life figures, made of cement and covered in glass and ceramic shards. Created by Fred Smith, who worked on the figures from 1950 to around 1964. The site has been damaged by storms, but undergoes periodic restorations. It is now owned by Price County.