Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

In college I studied literature—which is good preparation for life, but not for work. After graduation I became Tom Sawyer; my job was to paint my parents’ fence in Ohio. While painting, I came up with my next plan: I wanted to be a lifeguard at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. To my chagrin as a Thoreauvian, this job was not available. But in the meantime I discovered one that was: teaching inner-city third graders in Minneapolis. I took the job.

Turns out I was more a playmate than a teacher—the kids loved me, and I them, but between our affections, few lessons were learned. So what? We had fun. My favorite “project” was to walk my students—Neandra, Channelle, Terese (they were the Supremes of the eight-year-old set), Winston, and D’Angelo, among them—to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center. This dreamy landscape incorporates acres of gardens and dozens of jaw-dropping sculptures by such artists as Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, George Segal, Frank Gehry, and more. At the garden’s heart is the ludicrous “Spoonbridge and Cherry”—a 50-foot-long dessert spoon scooping a 15-foot-high water-squirting cherry over a small lily pond—by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. If you ever want to render kids speechless, bring them here.

To get to the garden, my students and I crossed the artful Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (itself a sculpture by Siah Armajani), which spans 16 lanes of traffic. Along the bridge’s upper beams, a poem by John Ashberry reads “And now I cannot remember how I would have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place. The place of movement and an order...” As a traveler, I think this means that the places we love aren’t so much specific locations as they are vessels of memory and meaning, reflections of ourselves at a specific time in life.

So to say that my place of a lifetime is the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden isn’t entirely accurate because for me the garden wasn’t so much a place as it was an escape from having to be in a specific place. And now that the garden holds my memories, I can’t tell whether it’s the garden I love or the memories of it that I love. Or maybe I’m too much the literature major here. Maybe it’s enough to say that I will return to the garden not just to see the sculptures again, but to see myself anew.

—George W. Stone

George W. Stone is a Traveler assistant editor.