Tamsie Ringler's "Landing on Eros" is one of 75 works at the Franconia Sculpture Park.
Franconia hosts 15 to 25 artists and up to 15 artist interns each year.
(Photo by Michael Crouser)
The Art of Fun
Minnesota Monthly, August, 2003
David Mahoney
"Is that thing real?"
We had just come around the tail ends of two rusty cars, one piled on top of the other as if it had run it over from behind, when I spotted what appeared to be a very large snake appraising the bottom car's tire. The anxious question I put to my two kids - Nick, 11, and Claire, 8 - was prompted by the snake's stock-still posture, which led me to believe that perhaps it was as much an artifice as the simulated car wreck. We stared at the prodigious reptile for what seemed an eternity before its head made a robotic movement that left me still wondering if it might be a remote-controlled replica. My doubts were dispelled only when its entire 5-foot length finally slithered away through the grass.
Intriguing juxtapositions of the natural and artificial are part of the appeal of Franconia Sculpture Park - and, for that matter, of the Taylors Falls area in general, which has the additional attraction of being only about an hour away from the heart of the Twin Cities. So when a rare obligation-free stretch opened up in the middle of a blue-skied summer weekend, I rounded up my family for a whirlwind excursion to one of the state's premier hot spots for summer fun.
Franconia Sculpture Park may be Minnesota's ultimate roadside attraction. It appears like a dream along State Highway 8 in the midst of gently rolling farmland above the St. Croix River Valley. After parking our car near a barn with an op-art pattern painted on one side, we strolled through the 16-acre park, as enchanted by unexpected sights such as the fox snake (as some research later identified it) and songbirds perched atop sculptures as by the monumental works of art that we circled, climbed, entered, and even played, in the case of a steel composition of drum-like shapes.
Our surprise took a sobering turn as we admired a trio of fiberglass figures representing three downed members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen from World War II. Because the figures are arrayed around a circular target, I commented that it looked like it was intended to be some kind of ground zero. My wife, Lisa, said, "Come look at this." On a board were posted tributes to the artist, Michael Richards, who was killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Hard as it was to believe, global events had left their mark even on this bucolic spot....