Picnic on Art

In an article on CANOEtravel.com, (among my favorite places to read about travel besides GoNOMAD, of course) author, Carolyn Thompson of the AP wrote about Ashford Hollow, NY, where you can picnic with art.

She wrote, “Try climbing on a sculpture inside a museum and chances are a security guard will show you the door. So go ahead and touch, crawl — heck, picnic — on the art at Griffis Sculpture Park. There’s no door. Nor walls or ceiling, for that matter.

Just 200 hectares of sweeping meadows, ponds and forest, where art is as much a part of the landscape as the wildflowers and ferns that surround it.

“It’s a very relaxing setting. It’s so beautiful,” said Simon Griffis, executive director of the site and the son of its founder, Larry Griffis.

Larry Griffis, himself a sculptor, needed only to see his young children romp among some ruins outside Rome years ago to know this was how sculpture should be viewed.

“He sat back and said, ‘This is absolutely remarkable. Look at my kids,'” Simon Griffis recounts. “‘I’ve taken them to the finest museums and galleries but they’ve come alive in this environment where they can interact and they can smell the flowers and they can touch things.”‘

It is a marriage of art and nature that is growing ever more popular. There are more than 500 outdoor sculpture parks around the world, ranging from smaller spaces geared to the artists-in-residence who create there, to large tourist destinations and education centers…”