Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, one of the world’s most significant botanic and sculpture experiences, was recently named the Top Sculpture Park in the United States by USA Today’s “10Best” and listed as the 81st most visited museum in the world by The Art Newspaper, the leading global art news publication. The 158-acre main campus features Michigan’s largest tropical conservatory; one of the country’s largest interactive children’s gardens; arid and Victorian gardens with bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin; a carnivorous plant house; outdoor gardens, including a replica 1930s-era farm garden; an eight-acre Japanese garden featuring contemporary sculpture; and a 1,900-seat outdoor amphitheater garden, showcasing an eclectic mix of world-renowned touring musicians each summer. The permanent collection highlights hundreds of sculptures from internationally acclaimed artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, El Anatsui, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Marshall Fredericks, Henry Moore, Michele Oka Donor, Beverly Pepper, Jaume Plensa, Auguste Rodin, Richard Serra, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Ai Weiwei, among others. Indoor galleries with changing sculpture exhibitions have hosted shows by Jonathan Borofsky, Edgar Degas, Jim Dine, Richard Hunt, Cristina Iglesias, Rebecca Louise Law, Pablo Picasso, George Segal and others.
Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park promotes the enjoyment, understanding and appreciation of gardens, sculpture, the natural environment, and the arts.
Education programs welcome 80,000 students and guests each year. Culinary Arts & Events offerings include weddings, corporate meetings and award-winning catering.
Photo by Michael Moran
Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism explores Jaume Plensa’s career-long engagement with themes common to our shared humanity such as dreams, desire, justice and mortality. While Plensa’s oeuvre is marked by diversity in format and media, the human condition remains the primary subject of his art, which traverses the personal and collective, individual and universal. Featuring both monumental and intimate-scaled sculptures and select two-dimensional works that span three decades, this is the first retrospective of this internationally acclaimed artist in the United States.
Image: Jaume Plensa. Hortense in Slumberland, 2021. Bronze, Edition of 11. 30 x 22 x 20 cm. Photo: Roberto Ruiz © Plensa Studio Barcelona