Art Review: Outdoor Sculpture Showcase at Clark Art Institute

Ground/work 2025 is the splendid, very different summer extravaganza at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. Distinguished for its permanent collection of Renoirs, Sargents, and Homers and for its big, academic paintings shows held indoors in summer, this year the Clark has done an outdoor, contemporary sculpture show, displayed here and there on the Clark’s 140-acre campus. I’d never heard of the Japanese ceramicist Yō Akiyama, the English wood sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon, the Mexican architect Javier Senosiain, or any of the other artists whose commissioned sculptures are on view, but what’s life without revelation, or a hike?

I’ve been going to the Clark since the 1960s, when my parents owned a farm in Stamford in Vermont, a few miles from Williamstown, and I went to Williams and was a curator at the Clark. Living in southwestern Vermont now, not far north of the Clark, I consider it and the Bennington Museum my two much-loved art spots. The Clark’s “Back 140,” as we called it, was, for years, an area of woods with rudimentary trails, alongside a hilly cow pasture rented by a farmer. On top was a pretty mountain view enjoyed by the intrepid and to which the cows were oblivious. A fence in a deep ditch separated the woods and cows from a patch of museum parking lot and the low-slung, homely, nuts-and-bolts art-conservation building. Pretty and precious, it wasn’t.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Ground/work 2025 is the splendid, very different summer extravaganza at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. Distinguished for its permanent collection of Renoirs, Sargents, and Homers and for its big, academic paintings shows held indoors in summer, this year the Clark has done an outdoor, contemporary sculpture show, displayed here and there on the Clark’s 140-acre campus. I’d never heard of the Japanese ceramicist Yō Akiyama, the English wood sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon, the Mexican architect Javier Senosiain, or any of the other artists whose commissioned sculptures are on view, but what’s life without revelation, or a hike?

I’ve been going to the Clark since the 1960s, when my parents owned a farm in Stamford in Vermont, a few miles from Williamstown, and I went to Williams and was a curator at the Clark. Living in southwestern Vermont now, not far north of the Clark, I consider it and the Bennington Museum my two much-loved art spots. The Clark’s “Back 140,” as we called it, was, for years, an area of woods with rudimentary trails, alongside a hilly cow pasture rented by a farmer. On top was a pretty mountain view enjoyed by the intrepid and to which the cows were oblivious. A fence in a deep ditch separated the woods and cows from a patch of museum parking lot and the low-slung, homely, nuts-and-bolts art-conservation building. Pretty and precious, it wasn’t.