Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum facts for kids
Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum is a special non-profit park located in Hamilton, Ohio. It's a place where you can explore a large outdoor collection of sculptures. The park also has a 'pioneer house' built in the 1820s, which is very old! You can visit the Ancient Sculpture Museum, which displays art from ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Egyptian times. This museum opened in 2017 and was designed to look like houses from ancient Rome. There's also a Gallery Museum, opened in 2016, that always shows new art by modern artists. To learn more about the artworks, you can use an app called Otocast. Sometimes, the artists themselves share information about their pieces on the app.
How Pyramid Hill Started
Harry T. Wilks (1925 - 2014) bought the land for the park in 1987. He built the Pyramid House there to be his private home. Over the next few years, Mr. Wilks started collecting large sculptures. He also bought more land next to his property. He worked hard to make the park beautiful, adding roads, small lakes, and walking trails.
The park officially opened in 1996. A writer for The Atlantic magazine, André Emmerich, said it was "the most beautiful natural setting of any art park in the country." In 1997, Mr. Wilks created a non-profit group to run the park. This means the park is run for the public good, not to make money. Besides its permanent art, the park often shows new art from artists all over the world.
In 2019, Sean FitzGibbons became the new Executive Director of the park. He has a lot of experience with public art. He helped design and build art installations in cities like San Antonio, Seattle, and Houston. Mr. FitzGibbons studied sculpture and visual arts in college. He has shown his own art in more than 20 exhibitions.
On October 30, 2020, some sculptures from Pyramid Hill were part of a special event. They were included in the opening of the Cincinnati Art Museum's Art Climb. The Art Climb is a set of stairs with landings. It was built to give people new ways to reach the museum from nearby neighborhoods. It also became a place to show temporary art exhibits.
What Art You Can See
The park has 71 permanent art pieces that are always there. It also hosts special shows by modern artists. Some of the most interesting permanent artworks include:
- Cincinnati Story by George Sugarman: This is a colorful structure that used to be in downtown Cincinnati.
- Age of Stone by Jon Isherwood: This is a huge work made of nine large granite pieces. They are 12 to 18 feet tall! People have compared it to Stonehenge because of its size.
- Abracadabra by Alexander Liberman: This artist also created other sculptures in the park, like Laocoon and Torre II, which are made of welded steel.
- Artist Bill Barrett also has a permanent sculpture in the collection.
See also
- List of sculpture parks
- Sculpture garden
- Sculpture trails
