Sculpture in the Open Air

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia

by Leah Hansen
Goldring Arts Journalism Student

A small blue sign on Route 20 in Cazenovia is the only clue that a sprawling park punctuated by outdoor art hides but a few hundred feet away. The entrance to the park, located on Stone Quarry Road, is a tiny driveway that serves as a break in the wall of hedgerows lining the road. The 107-acre Stone Quarry Hill Art Park opened in 1991, and consists of sculptures nestled along three miles of trails, an indoor gallery, an artist-in-residence program and a multitude of activities available to the public.

It was all created by sculptor and park founder Dorothy Riester, whose petite frame and easy smile reveal her remarkable vitality at the age of 89. She wrote in her curator’s statement for the park’s first exhibition that her goal was to establish a sculpture park ‘‘as a way of preserving this beautiful site and filling a need for such a facility.’’

Now, she says, ‘‘other parks write to us to see how we do it.’’

Inside the park, a visitor’s first view of sculpture is Carl Reed’s ‘‘The Outlyers,’’ situated on the right, beyond the artists-in-residence lodge. This installation is a collection of carved wooden posts about 10 feet high spread out within roughly 2,500 square feet. When the grass in the field hasn’t been cut, the bases of the posts blend in with the earth and appear to be growing among the hay and cornflower.

On the left side of the entrance is an installation titled ‘‘Induction’’ by Dariusz Lipski, consisting of boulders inside three-foot-high steel coils half-hidden in a grove. Once past these trees, the park opens into an expansive meadow sloping up a hill. A road follows the contour of the land up to the house built by Riester and her late husband, Robert, who was an engineer for the Carrier Corporation.

Riester and her husband built the house after spending their first summer camping on the property. They moved into it during the 1960s, but Riester moved to the artists’ lodge after her husband passed away in 1990. The house now serves as the visitor center and stands next to the flower and sculpture garden that Riester still tends today.

The wooded trails begin behind the house. A hiker must keep a sharp eye out to find the artworks, as some of the installations are off the trail and hidden by undergrowth, the only clues to their existence the small signs listing the title and artist beside the path. Because many of the sculptures are made out of natural materials such as hay or vines, they are subject to the elements.

‘‘The sculptures react to the seasons, weather and light,’’ says Natalia Mount, the park’s executive director. ‘‘They work with nature.’’An untitled sculpture by Dorothy Riester

The natural decay of the sculptures becomes part of the art. Steven Siegel’s sculpture, ‘‘Facing, love 30,’’ looks like 10 feet of rotting, wet paper atop another 10 feet of stacked giant Lincoln Logs. When inspected closely, ‘‘Facing’’ turns out to be layers of old newspapers, still neatly folded, balanced on a base of narrow logs.

‘‘Facing’’ started out in 1999 as a rectangular block shape. By now, however, the elements have molded the slight indentation in its face into a very rounded, smooth contour. The paper has taken on a bright orange color, lending the piece a significant resemblance to the curves and stripes of Arizona canyons. Amazingly, the words on some of the newspapers are still discernible.

Sculptor Al Zaruba’s wooden boat, ‘‘The Scent of Light,’’ was docked alongside the park’s entrance drive for five years before it succumbed to natural decay. Rather than allow it to fall apart completely, he returned to the park in early July to dismantle and burn what remained. The bonfire became a public festival to which Zaruba brought dancers and African drummers. The dancers wore huge costumes made of bright feathers that waved and swirled as they moved. Zaruba retained some of the boards that had been written on by park visitors and built smaller sculptures from them, which now hang in the indoor Winner Gallery at the park.

The boat-burning is only one example of many activities offered each summer, most of which are free, including film screenings, a pottery fair and art education programs.

The Stone Quarry Hill Art Park is open year-round. The outdoor installations and the Winner Gallery will remain open until Oct. 15, and the last event of the summer will be the annual Art in the Sky Kite Festival on Sept. 24.

See Stone Quarry Hill Art Park for more information.

"Gnomen" by Frank Gonzales

Photos by Leah Hansen