Author: Audrey Desnain
Most people associate Hartwood Acres with its mansion, amphitheater, and large network of wooded trails. Fewer people go to Hartwood Acres for its sculpture garden. To some, these large abstract sculptures from the late twentieth century might even seem an undesirable presence.
I was at the Hartwood Acres sculpture garden on a warm August night, around sunset. Using my boyfriend as a guinea pig, I was practicing for the tour I was going to be leading in two days alongside fellow interns, Layne Shaffer, and Samantha Wert. The pressure was on, as this tour was going to be the cumulation of six months of research and writing we had conducted. On such a beautiful evening, it was natural that we weren’t the only ones visiting Hartwood Acres. The sprawling grounds were populated by photographers and their clients.
I began with practicing for one of my favorite sculptures of the collection, Lila Katzen’s Coronet: Homage to David Smith. A young woman was getting headshots nearby and had her back to the sculpture . It did not take long for me to overhear the photographer ask “Could you maybe move this way? I’m not loving the statue in the background.” My boyfriend and I immediately started chuckling, diffusing some of the tension I felt about the tour. The irony that I was there trying to shine a new light on the work contrasted with the opposite view was not lost on us.
I started this project in January 2023 as one of three interns working with the Office for Public Art (OPA). I worked closely alongside Professor Alex Taylor, and Rachel Klipa, the Program Manager for Education and Outreach at OPA. Our work arose from the need of the Alleghany County Parks Foundation to compile an archive and body of research for the works in the Hartwood Acres sculpture garden. This summer, I was awarded a Fine Foundation summer fellowship to continue working on the project by crafting short narratives on each work and helping conduct a walking tour of the sculpture garden. In the beginning, I was very much like that photographer. I knew little to nothing about abstract expressionist sculpture. It was not until I learned about the sculptors and their work that they began to resonate with me more.
The tour was going to be private, focused on an audience already connected to Hartwood Acres or public art in Pittsburgh. The purpose of the project had always been to make the Hartwood Acres sculptures more accessible to the public, but how do you make a large sculpture engaging? How can someone’s internal thoughts and feelings about a work of art, may they be negative or positive, blend with the meaning behind them? These were my main thoughts when crafting the script for the tour. I hope that if that photographer had been on the tour, her opinion about Coronet would have changed, even if only slightly. Maybe her opinion would have stayed the same though, and that would have been okay too.
Pictured in the photo, Audrey Desnain, standing in front of Joseph Goto’s Tower Iron, Sculpture No. 5.
Audrey Desnain was a Fine Foundation Summer Fellow at the Office of Public Art, 2023