Heritage Museums & Gardens | Art Installations
In August 2024, I went on a five-day trip to Cape Cod, MA where I visited many museums and cultural organizations, along with quick history stops and trails. My first stop was Heritage Museums & Gardens (HMG) in Sandwich, MA. The first part of this six-part miniseries focused on the gardens, second part on J.K. Lilly III Automobile Gallery, and the third covered small buildings. In the fourth installment, I look at the art installations on the grounds.
Most of the art installations were created by Cape Cod sculptor Alfred Glover. These folk art pieces were made from wood and salvaged aluminum. Glover’s work also had appeared at Cahoon Museum of American Art in Barnstable, MA and Highfield Hall & Garden in Falmouth, MA, two places I would visited later in my trip. The installations were sponsored by Arts Foundation of Cape Cod (AFCC), which has sponsored local arts since 1987.
Many of Glover’s pieces told a story. For Espalier Tree: The Giant Gingo (2020) created in 2020, animals from the same village search for a missing puppy, who hides on the top of the sculpture in a birdnest. For The Old Road to Cape Cod (2024), Glover featured Cape Cod houses on the top of an arbor in between giant leaves and flowers. The Cape Cod house itself has an interesting history. Like many colonial era Post-Medieval houses built in New England, the original houses constructed on the Cape during the 17th century began with a hall or large central room with a massive fireplace and chimney. Over time, descendants of the original builder would add rooms to the side and back of the house. Classic Cape Cod houses tend to be white, gray, or brown, but Glover’s houses were bright red and orange to match his colorful palette.
Glover took inspiration not only from life around him but also from internationally acclaimed art. His aluminum sculpture Spirit Man Is Beleaguered by Birds (2020), Glover created a whimsical piece based on the work of Henri Matisse and André Derain, two French artists who founded the Fauvism art movement. This early 20th century style was inspired by the phrase les Fauves, meaning “the wild beasts” came after both the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements. The movement was characterized by extra bright colors and wild brustrokes, pushing even farther away from realism.
Besides vibrant sculpture, the grounds also contained a Flume Fountain and a Sundial in the Daylily Garden. In 2010, HMG hosted a competition for best fountain design, and Stephen Stimson Associates of Cambridge, MA was declared the winner. The studio’s website contained many diagrams and explanations on how the Flume was constructed to preserve the natural landscape and bring water 208 feet (63.4 meters) to the stunning 26-foot (7.9-meter) drop into a pool.
Nearby, the large Sundial displayed the time of day. At 40 inches (1 meter) in diameter and with a weight of more than 1,000 pounds (450 kg), this was among the biggest sundials I have seen. The sculpture predated the Flume by about thirty years, as it was made by sculptor James Moss in 1981. The sundial is even registered with the North American Sundial Society as an armillary sphere, meaning that the sculpture has bonus rings shaped like a globe to help the users understand the location of boundaries on earth, like the equator or the arctic circle, based on astronomical bodies. Calculating how to build this type of art took a lot of math, so I preferred just to look.
The rating of this site will appear at the end of the series.