Grounds for Sculpture offers surreal surprises near Philadelphia

Before even getting out of your car, you start to question reality at Grounds for Sculpture. Driving in, there’s a group of people along the road holding a banner that reads “Hurrah Welcome,” and signs that say “We thought you’d never get here” and “I drink to your arrival.”

“Is this for me?” you may think. “How did they know I was coming? And why aren’t they moving?" Then it hits you, perhaps a little later than it should have — these stiffs are statues. Just an hour outside Philadelphia, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, is one of my favourite weird and wonderful corners of this strange and beautiful world.

Here, it’s hard to tell the real people from the fake ones. Here, beloved paintings are brought to life and invite you to step inside and become a part of them. Here is where wonder — true, childlike wonder — awaits around every corner, if only you’re open to it. I tell everyone I know about Grounds for Sculpture, and if they say they’ve never been or haven’t heard of it, which a surprising number of Philadelphians do, I tell them they’ve got to go, because the magic that exists there is so rare in this world that you are powerfully overwhelmed to share it.

That’s why I took three of my colleagues who were first timers to explore it last month. I’m also obviously biased, so I wanted to get the untainted opinions of my coworkers — reporter Michelle Myers and social media editors Esra Erol and Sam Stewart — for journalism’s sake. They are now as biased as I am.

“It is magical,” Myers said after our visit. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you, you just need to experience the magic.” Built on the former site of the New Jersey State Fairgrounds, this 42-acre sculpture park and arboretum opened in 1992. It is home to more than 300 sculptures by almost 200 artists, from the wildly abstract to the fabulously figurative. But it is the work of one man — the park’s founder, the late artist and philanthropist Seward Johnson — that is the soul of Grounds for Sculpture.

A sculptor known for his hyperrealism, Johnson, who was an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, not only had a boatload of money, he had a ton of talent and an immense imagination. Gary Garrido Schneider, executive director of Grounds for Sculpture, described Johnson as generous — not just with his money but with his art. “It is democratic in a way that invites people to be playful, to allow them to be joyful,” Schneider said. “The park was really designed as an immersive sensory experience, and that includes touch. Sculpture is physical and Seward was...adamant that you should be able to touch the sculptures here.”

Johnson has about 45 works on display at the park and they generally fall into two series: Celebrating the Familiar, his sculptures of everyday people doing everyday things, like a young couple asleep in the grass, and Beyond the Frame, life-size sculptures of famous Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, like a version of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream you can Inception yourself into, or a recreation of Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, you can step inside of. You’re hit with a one-two punch of both types of sculptures at the entrance, where your attention is demanded by a 21-foot-tall version of the twirling, rosy-cheeked couple in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at Bougival and diverted from the man on a nearby bench talking to a young child. Your mind assumes the man and child are fellow visitors, until you realise they’re not.

“The amount of times I’m going to think a sculpture is a real person today,” Myers said.

Inside the park, my colleagues marveled at the size and variety of sculptures and their placement within the rolling landscape of changing fall colors. There was a garden of monoliths under a canopy of yellow leaves that gave off Stonehenge vibes. And just beyond it, in a wooded area no signs tell you to explore, were life-size statues of four beautifully-dressed 19th-century women gathered under a tree, whom Johnson modeled after Claude Monet’s Femmes au jardin. This was my fourth visit and I’d never seen these women before. It felt like discovering a secret, like something hidden for only those willing to explore, and that’s a gift Grounds for Sculpture — whose every hill and water feature was intentionally crafted — gives again and again.

“The element of surprise is a huge part of the park because you don’t know what’s gonna be around that corner,” Schneider said. “It could be something intimate, it could be something large and monumental, and that sense of discovery — of surprise and joy and whimsy — is a big part of how the park was designed.”

Whimsy can seem in short supply these days, but I saw it on the faces of my colleagues as we pretended to cast spells over a caldron filled with skulls guarded by three larger-than-life demonic female figures, which Johnson based on Odilon Redon’s painting, The Three Fates. “This is my favorite thing ever. This is so cool,” Stewart said, of the piece Johnson cheekily titled Has Anyone Seen Larry? (The Three Fates).