Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens

The collection, which also features works by Henri Laurens, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Richard Erdman, Jean Dubuffet, and Claes Oldenburg, focuses on major 20th-century art.

A strip of lawn and rows of trees extend down the open, north arm of the cross-like courtyard, ending in the center, where a large fountain with David Wynne's "Girl with a Dolphin" is surrounded by a wide paved area.

Surrounding the building, and seen in distant vistas, are monumental sculptures and nearby gardens with small ponds.

The vast south lawn allows the viewer to take in the full size of the structure, and the lower ground enhances the height of the building, an effect lessened on the north (entrance) side by trees and a more level approach.

[1] According to The New York Times, as of September 2006, the sculpture garden is open daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., April to October, and from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., November to March.

He envisioned as essential to that ambience a museum without walls, where works of art could be enjoyed by the employees, the community and the public," according to an article in The New York Times.

[1] When the new site was officially dedicated on October 2, 1970, Kendall said he wanted to create "one of the greatest modern sculpture exhibits in the world".

An employee monitors the sculptures with weekly inspections, driving around in a golf cart "outfitted with brooms, brushes, a ladder, calipers, thermometers and a can of Pepsi."

In the spring, birds like to nest in a work by Nevelson, chipmunks prefer the mysterious inner spaces of Judith Brown's "Caryatid", a welded steel sculpture made of automobile parts.

At one point, carpenter bees started chewing into Robert Davidson's "Totems," a 45-foot (14 m) Western red cedar sculpture.

"[5] As of 1991, maintenance staff at the garden wrote up a weekly report on each piece of sculpture after observing each for damage.