Administered by Terry Tomasello Area 2 ha | Open All year | |
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Type Admission Free Public Art Space Location 520 West Waugh Street, Dalton, Whitfield County, Georgia, United States Established October 20, 2010; 6 years ago (2010-10-20) Visitors Approximately 10,000 per year | ||
The Robert T. Webb Sculpture Garden is a 5-acre admission-free, open-air museum and sculpture park located in Dalton, Georgia, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is operated by the Creative Arts Guild, the state's oldest multi-disciplinary, community arts organization. The sculpture garden is the first permanent installation of its kind in the state of Georgia The garden features almost 40 outdoor sculptures in three sections of the Guild's property—the Magnolia Crescent, the Rosen Garden and the Founders Garden—that provide an organic setting for the works, including mature trees, shrubs and flowers. The garden includes works by prominent artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Scott Burton, Guy Dill, Chana Orloff and Ken Macklin. The Creative Arts Guild also maintains an indoor art gallery, which hosts rotating exhibits by local, regional and national artists. The sculpture garden welcomes approximately 10,000 visitors each year and is an educational resource for regional schools.
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History
The sculpture garden was launched in October 2010 after local businessperson and arts patron Robert Webb raised funds for the purchase of twelve garden scale and monumental works by U.S. and Canadian artists to complement a vintage Noguchi piece donated by George and Rhenda Spence and five works that had been gifted to the Creative Guild by artists who participated in a 2003 juried exhibition curated by John Raymond Henry Webb worked with Guild executive director Terry Tomasello to grow the garden gradually, adding new work periodically during each subsequent year to maintain public interest while cultivating a sense of a unified whole in the work. The garden now features 40 works by artists from the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Robert Webb
Robert Webb is a native of Dalton, Georgia, and a graduate of Emory University, where he launched the school's national literary journal, Lullwater Review and received a Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. He is a widely published writer and recipient of a 1991 Georgia Council for the Arts individual artist grant in poetry as well as an arts patron and collector of American art. Webb has been honored for his community work by Georgia Trend Magazine, which named him to their annual "Top 40 under 40" list in 2005, and by the Atlanta Falcons, which cited him as a "Community Quarterback" in 2006. Webb is an executive at Mohawk Industries, a Fortune 500 flooring manufacturer, and is a three-time chair of the Creative Arts Guild's board of directors. Webb continues to curate the garden, seeking work from artists, galleries and auction houses. The garden's logo features Webb's signature, rendered as his initials.
On October 6, 2015, Webb was honored by Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia as one of the recipients of the annual Governor's Awards for the Arts and Humanities at the state capitol in Atlanta.
Key works
Webb has stated that the sculpture garden's works were selected to showcase different sculptural forms—carving, casting, assembling and modeling—as well as to create a dialogue between the works. In each section of the garden, key monumental works serve as "anchors" to define the spaces. In the more expansive "Magnolia Crescent," William Wareham's Duende, Ken Macklin's Simoon, Guy Dill's Spreader, Caroline Ramersdorfer's Inner View Deeper, and Kyle Van Lusk's Fallen define the space. The Founder's Garden space is defined by Don Lawler's Seedling, Robert Willms' Trojan Taurus, Verina Baxter's Mr. Wrinkle's Favorite Speedwagon and Jim Wolfe's Wm. Tell. Inner View Deeper and Seedling illustrate the art of stone carving. Both works are hand carved by the artists using traditional as well as power tools. Trojan Taurus is an example of assemblage sculpture, which in this instance involves the welding together of pieces of mild steel.
Future
The sculpture garden continues to focus on outreach to non-traditional audiences. The property, with no gates or barriers, is available to the community from dawn to dusk year round and offers Guide by Cell based narration to cell-phone users. The Guild's website now features videos of each sculpture to provide viewers with a more engaging virtual experience. Additional works will become a part of the garden in the years ahead, with a constant goal of maintaining the intimacy of the viewers' experience and successfully integrating new work into the existing collection.