Photo of the Day: ‘Eighth Wonder’ Sculpture, Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA

The town of Stockbridge, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, has long been a magnet for artists, including Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial. The tradition continues today at Chesterwood, French’s summer home and studio, now preserved as a museum. In particular, the museum, as it has done for 39 years, has presented exhibitions of contemporary large-scale artworks.

The exhibit that was up there when I visited two weeks ago, and which will continue until Oct. 9, is “Out of Site: Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood.” It contains works by 14 artists, asked by guest curator Sharon Bates to develop new projects or to adapt existing works that directly respond to the environmental, cultural, and aesthetic attributes of the landscape at Chesterwood.

One in particular struck me, which is why I took this photo: The Eighth Wonder, by Brian Kane and Michael Oatman. Instead of “Wonder,” a more accurate term for the subject matter of this inflatable sculpture would be “Monster.” I say that in a descriptive, rather than pejorative, sense. This piece, created from 2014 to 2017 and designed for Toronto’s Union Station, was inspired by eyewitness accounts of sea monsters, as well as images from 1950s sci-fi movies.

How, you might ask, does this sculpture “respond to…attributes of the landscape at Chesterwood”? There’s not much in the way of water around the property, but there is something of the same size as this figure. It’s a small-scale version of an item that is itself an early approach to French’s most famous work: Abraham Lincoln, in the great secular temple created for him by a grateful republic in Washington, DC. Kane and Oatman figure that their monster would be the same as Mr. Lincoln, were he to stand up.