In addition to wooden and stone artworks, the garden also features landscaping and plants organized by Wallace M. Ruff, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, and research fellow in the Department of Architecture and Building, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea.
Behind the eagle is a cluster of about a dozen, enormously tall wooden poles carved with exquisitely elaborate Iatmul and Kwoma motifs and patterns.
A series of brightly painted Kwoma poles forms another aesthetic cluster, while the third area of the garden consists of large sculptures in pumice, an entirely new medium for the carvers since stone is rare in the Sepik flood plain.
The carvers, working on a six-month educational visa, were given local donations by individuals, organizations, and businesses of food, medical care, clothing, transportation, recreation, materials, and a trip to Disneyland.
One of the Iatmul artists, Teddy Balangu from Palimbei village, later was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (University of British Columbia).
One of the great aesthetic joys of the sculpture garden is the visual contemplation of the ironies that arise from the cross-cultural dialogue and categorization of artworks in the contemporary, transnational or globalized world.
A goal of the project was not to recreate a traditional Melanesian setting but, as Mason himself reported, to create "an opportunity to experiment with and reinterpret New Guinea aesthetic perspectives within the new context of a Western public art space."
That is, the carvers were given an opportunity to "break free", in a sense, from the conventional aesthetic constraints of the village in the Papua New Guinea – to create art not possible in a Sepik River setting.
Similarly, the garden foregrounds the individuality of the artists – identifying them by name on each piece, which rarely, if ever, occurs in museum displays of "traditional" tribal art.
[5] The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts leads tours of the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden on the fourth Sundays of the Month, 11:30 am, rain or shine; meet on the corner of Santa Teresa and Lomita Drive.
"Created on-site at Stanford by artists from Papua New Guinea, the garden contains wood and stone carvings of people, animals, and magical beings that illustrate clan stories and creation myths.