Dumbarton Oaks Adds Modern Sculpture

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Dumbaton Oaks recently added a temporary exhibit of the sculpture of Charles Simonds to their gardens and museum. Simonds is known for creating clay sculptures often featuring tiny worlds of buildings and brick walls. Around the gardens you can find a few of these examples as well as more organic and animal-like sculptures, as seen in the slideshow. It’s a lot of fun to walk around the grounds trying to spot his work; it’s like an Easter Egg Hunt of modern sculpture. Some of it is quite obvious to find, but others are so well incorporated into the landscape that you might not even notice it. Supposedly there’s a disturbing disembodied head around, but GM couldn’t find it.

Inside the museum, the selected works more reflect Simonds’ tiny-worlds genre. As you can see in the photos, he has created what appear to be ancient temples or monuments made out of tiny bricks and covered in the red sand of a distant desert. Whereas the larger sculptures sometimes clashed with the formal gardens, these blend seamlessly with the Pre-Columbian art around it. GM highly recommends a visit, and if you find the disembodied head let us know where it is.

And a message to Dumbarton Oaks: Thank you for this new style of exhibition. It allows us to see the gardens in a new light. Now if only you let us see Dumbarton Oaks in other new lights, such as the light of Noon or even morning, that would truly be a welcome experiment.