The Brooklyn Rail

A buoyant crowd gathered around the Sun Ra Arkestra, jamming in Philadelphia’s Maja Park as the September sun set the musicians’ sequined costumes aglow, illuminating them in a resplendent aura. Earlier that Saturday morning a high-concept parade had marched up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to this park. Conceived of by artist and composer Arto Lindsay, the procession, Chaos and Kisses, featured local artists and theater troupes, circus acrobats and marching bands. Passersby and invited guests alike trooped up the road along with the performers, second-line style. Now, an exuberant energy activated the crowd in Maja Park. Kids bounced beach balls and munched pizza from a truck. People grooved and danced, and embraced in the deep, sustained hugs specific to an Arkestra performance. The madcap, improvisational revelry was in lockstep with the reason for the celebration itself—the grand opening of Calder Gardens, a sanctuary on the parkway dedicated to the work of Alexander Calder (1898–1976), the trailblazing twentieth-century artist.

I say “sanctuary” deliberately, because to call this place a museum is to discount what it is hoping to achieve; that is, a new way to consider art in an ostensibly institutional space. The Herzog & de Meuron-designed building sits on a nearly two-acre tract of land. Though sited across the road from the Barnes Foundation (who is partnering with Calder Gardens in administrative upkeep), the plot was long neglected by virtue of its awkward location alongside a highway. From this vacant lot the architects have materialized a mirage of a building: a slice of reflective metal slashing through the parcel, reinforced on its other planes by black wood slats that directly recall the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse Calder called home for much of his adult life. Abundant gardens, woodlands, and meadows designed by landscape architect Piet Oudolf surround the building. As the plantings grow and thrive, their reflections in the lustrous façade will likewise flourish.

Inside, it quickly becomes clear that most of the construction has taken place below ground level, which at first seems a startling decision for an artist so associated with effervescence and air. But the subterranean architecture actually serves to elevate, rather than depress the works on display. Here, with cavernous galleries intentionally designed with the peculiar nature of Calder’s sculptures in mind, mobiles are given plenty of room to unfurl and gyrate, while patrons have freedom to circle the stabiles, experiencing the shift in their essential qualities—an implied movement—as the progression is made. The layout encourages communion with the works rather than an acquiescence to them.

To that end, there is a deliberate lack of didactics (wall texts, object labels, gallery literature, and the like) that may at first be uncomfortable, even objectionable, to audiences accustomed to being “taught” by these materials. To them I say: go with it. There is more than one way to learn about and from a work of art, not least of which is the visceral experience of drawing your breath within its sphere while allowing your mind to caper across its forms and colors, its materials and gestures. This is what Calder Gardens encourages.

It seems safe to say the philosophy is what Calder himself also would have encouraged. “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential,” he once said, adding with characteristic wryness, “as long as they have something else in theirs.” A ramble through the inaugural installation allows for one’s innate, contemplative self to take the wheel. Black Widow, a 1948 mobile, immediately comes into view as one descends the steps towards the lower galleries. The below-ground gallery is also visible from this mezzanine vantage point, allowing the viewer to take in another Black Widow, this one a stabile from 1959, sited on the floor below the mobile. From above, its arcing legs and billowing, sail-like forms seem diminutive while the mobile commands the space. Walk downstairs and the reverse becomes true: the realities of scale shift depending on one’s position. Secret pockets and curved, winding walkways delineate the space. Slowing down, backtracking, and repeated loops through the galleries will reward the curious and observant viewer. One major, indoor thoroughfare wends its way around an outdoor area visible through floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, which ensconces a monumental, untitled 1954 standing mobile, one of the relative few of Calder’s outdoor works to include kinetic elements. Visitors may enter another sculpture garden housing two additional outdoor stabiles off a side gallery, before returning inside to witness the sublimity of Little Yellow Panel (1936), made just a few years after Calder’s invention of the mobile. Its free-hanging elements float before a painted wooden panel that hangs flush to the wall, allowing for an everchanging composition before a fixed surface, a painting in motion.

The installation is not comprehensive of Calder’s prolific output, nor is it meant to be. The curatorial agenda will be led by the Calder Foundation in New York, which has long stewarded the artist’s legacy. Along with a robust planned schedule of programming that will continually vivify the building, spearheaded by Senior Director of Programs Juana Berrío, artworks will cycle in and out of rotation, with some lingering on view for years, others for only months. This commitment to the anti-retrospective necessitates omission, especially for an artist with such a large and varied oeuvre. Most surprising in the current iteration is the absence of any wire works, so fundamental to Calder’s development as an artist. There are also no works of jewelry, household objects, bronzes, or toys—all formats (among others) into which he periodically dipped. But seen from another angle, these exclusions invite opportunity: the possibilities for other, nuanced perspectives of his work in anticipated installations down the road seem endless.

One especially prescient inclusion however, is a small, tucked away gallery of works by Calder’s ancestors—his mother, father, and grandfather were all artists with direct ties to the city of Philadelphia, where Calder was also born. The grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder sculpted the William Penn statue that sits atop Philadelphia City Hall at the opposite end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. At the center of that boulevard sits the Swann Memorial Fountain, by Calder’s father, Alexander Stirling Calder. In a way, Calder Gardens completes a metaphorical balance along this famed cultural artery.

That Calder Gardens has come to fruition—in the “City of Brotherly Love,” no less—at a moment when civics, democracy, and cultural life itself are all under attack in the United States cannot be overlooked. Contemplative and dialogical third places are rapidly disappearing from public life, replaced by the one omniscient third place, the virtual world. Notwithstanding the incalculable benefits the internet brings us, the deleterious effects have become plain: an erosion of mutual respect, courtesy, reason, and care, which makes the birth of this third place all the more joyful and necessary. Such a sanctuary as Calder Gardens is not only an innovative offering to our nation, it’s a reminder that though art may not save us, there is truth and beauty in the world worth saving.