The stately pair of 14-foot stone columns that flank the main entrance to the Garden at its southern end were fashioned from a huge block of granite Martin Puryear found at the Cold Spring quarries, 75 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Puryear drove spikes into the massive stone to split it in two, and then used a machine lathe--like a pencil sharpener-- to hone each piece into its final form. One end of each column retains the block shape and rough natural surfaces of the original stone, while the other end has been shaped into a smooth, elegantly tapered conical form. Similar contrasts of form and surface appear throughout Puryear's work, in which such opposites as nature and culture, the organic and the machine-made, and primitive and modern coexist in harmony. By installing the columns in opposite directions--one on its pointed end, the other on its square base--Puryear also comments on the contrast between stability and instability and offers an intentional challenge to the formal symmetry of the southern half of the Garden.

Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham has been investigating how spaces affect human behavior, how art and audiences are connected, and how works of art are linked to their physical, social, and economic contexts. His works have included color photographs of suburban tract homes; interactive perfor-mances, films, and video installations; and glass and mirror pavilions, which he has been making for more than twenty years. For the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden he has created a large geometric maze with walls that provide both transparent and reflective surfaces. As we interact with the sculpture we both see and are seen, view the surrounding environment and our own reflections. The piece conjures up questions about inside and outside, about public and private spaces, and--as the reflective surfaces respond to the motion of clouds and sun--about nature and culture.

Onto each of the twenty-eight white granite benches arranged symmetrically around the perimeter of a square, Jenny Holzer has engraved a different aphorism. Since the mid-1970s, using words as her artistic medium, Holzer has been disseminating her provocative messages--"truisms"--into public spaces: on posters, on stickers placed on parking meters or telephone booths, on electronic display signboards from Times Square to Caesar's Palace, and most recently, on the Internet. As the first woman artist to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990, Holzer created a memorable installation of twenty-one electronic signboards flashing messages in a babel of languages. Her sculptural installation in the Garden allows visitors a place to rest as they contemplate her cryptic, often contradictory, messages and the role that language plays in contemporary society.

"For The Living Series I [used] a moderate, average voice and language because I thought that would match the subject, which was everyday events that just happened to have some kind of kink to them. The writing described these events and then offered some sociopolitical observations or absurdities."--Jenny Holzer

More than 26 feet high and 42 feet wide, and weighing in at approximately three tons, Mark di Suvero's Arikidea is certainly deserving of the description "monumental." Yet this massive structure belies an ingeniously constructed delicacy. The gigantic steel beams have been masterfully balanced in such a way that a simple touch or a passing breeze will cause the structure to sway gently. The wooden swing suspended from its center playfully invites the viewer to further interact with the work, moving into and through its airy spaces. Beginning in the late 1950s, di Suvero drew on the gestural ideas of Abstract Expressionist painting, extending them into the three-dimensional realm of sculpture. His early cantilevered constructions of junkyard detritus (old tires, scrap metal, steel girders) later gave way to the massive, outdoor steel sculptures for which he is known today. The title of this piece evolved loosely from the word arachnid, Greek for "spider," a creature di Suvero admired for its capacity to create structures in space.

Trained as a scientist, Tony Cragg creates art that investigates the natural world. Yet if his sculptures comment on such topics as molecular structure, the human vascular system, or the Newtonian light spectrum, it is his use of man-made forms (either found or constructed) that transforms them into complex meditations on contemporary life. Here Cragg has constructed steel elements on a granite base--two smooth-surfaced concave cylindrical forms and two elemental biomorphic shapes--that comment on the Ordovician geological era of 500 million years ago, when oxygen was introduced into the atmosphere. While the oxygen gave rise to terrestrial life, it simultaneously killed off the species of algae that had produced it. The close resemblance of the cylinders to the cooling towers of nuclear power plants perhaps suggests an analogous life-death conundrum for our own technological age.

While Ellsworth Kelly is perhaps best known for his abstract paintings--canvases with sharply delineated areas of bold, flat color laid out in pure geometric shapes--the sculptures he has made throughout his career explore many of the same issues regarding form and space. The two eighteen-foot, gently curving bronze arcs of Double Curve are insistently two-dimensional (viewed from the side, they almost disappear). Like the flat shapes in his paintings, they depend on their precisely controlled relationship to each other and to the surrounding area for their impact and surprising complexity. Viewing the surfaces themselves--rich brown in the morning light, stark black silhouettes in the midday sun--the arcs seem to be bending toward one another; viewing the shapes between or around the arcs, a new vibrancy of space, in rhythm with the surrounding landscape, emerges.

Henry Moore once titled this standing figure Winged Victory. With her truncated arms and neck and elongated, protruding torso, she indeed recalls the famed Greek figure of that name. But the real inspiration for this creature was the breastbone of a bird. Moore discovered principles of form and rhythm for his sculptures in a variety of natural objects, such as rocks and plants. He had a particular fascination with bones and collected, studied, and drew them extensively to explore their complexity and dynamism. He incorporated the actual bird bone into an early maquette for this sculpture, eventually infusing its "knife-edge thinness" throughout the entire figure and retaining the rough, porous texture of bone in the work's bronze surface. Viewed from differing perspectives, the sculpture appears alternately razor sharp or rhythmically curvaceous.

In the years after World War II, Isamu Noguchi designed stage sets and costumes for the most advanced choreographers of the day: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and George Balanchine. This sculpture was originally an element of the stage design for Graham's 1950 Judith, a dramatization in dance of the Old Testament story in which the Hebrew widow saves Jerusalem by seducing the dreaded invader Holofernes and beheading him in his own bed. The structure in the Garden--originally made of balsa wood and recast by Noguchi in bronze nearly thirty years later--was covered with one of Graham's signature flowing cloths to form a tent at the moment of the dramatic deed. The fragile balance of the sculpture's four skeletal, weaponlike elements imparts the tense excitement of the story's dangerous scheme and recalls other of the artist's gravity-defying sculptures of the period. His 1947 pieces Avatar and Cronos, also in the Walker's permanent collection, are similar assemblages of slender elements joined together in an intricate system of balance.

The pensive "everyman" George Segal created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was made, like all his sculpture since the 1950s, from a plaster cast formed directly on a real-life model. Segal recast the work in bronze, applied the patina by hand to impart a rich, painterly quality, and placed the figure not on a pedestal, but on a simple fragment of concrete sidewalk near one of the Garden's tree-lined walkways. Here, passing visitors are drawn to this lonely, human-scaled figure. Segal acknowledges that his walking man is linked to a long tradition of striding figures in the history of art, beginning with the Egyptian prototype and "on and on through Rodin and Giacometti." Visitors to the Walker Art Center are well acquainted with one of Segal's famed "situation" sculptures, The Diner, in which two of his unpainted plaster figures inhabit the spare confines of a real-life coffee shop. It reminds us of the deep isolation that can accompany our encounters in everyday life.

Deborah Butterfield, who owns, rides, and trains horses on her ranch in Montana, has likened the act of "building" a horse through training to the creative process of building her sculptures. Since the early 1970s, Butterfield has been creating magnificently observed, highly individualized horses from a diversity of found materials--fragments of wood, wire, scrap metal, mud, brick dust, and straw. Woodrow is something of a technical tour de force. Butterfield took a selection of sticks, tree branches, and bark, cast each element individually in bronze, and then assembled and welded the pieces together to create the stately beast. Each element was then patinated to create the look of the original sticks and branches. The trompe l'oeil effect is so convincing that many visitors to the Garden believe the piece is actually made of wood.

Born in Tokyo and working in Minneapolis since the 1960s, Kinji Akagawa combines the elegant simplicity of Japanese aesthetics with a deep concern for the impact of art on public places. He strives to invite private activities such as reading, thinking, and even writing into the "street" furniture he creates and incorporates common, local materials into their context. The bench he created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden combines unfinished green basalt from Minnesota, a vertical base of highly polished granite from South Dakota, and a horizontal slab of cedar that recalls forests from the region's past. The three elements retain their separate and unique characteristics as they combine to create an elegant whole that invites us to rest, read, and reflect in the Garden.

When Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz emigrated to Paris in 1909, his friendship with the Spanish artists Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso led him to explore Cubism in his sculptures. By the late 1920s, however, Lipchitz moved from these figures made of flat planes and angular masses to a looser style based on natural forms, and he began to explore themes and ideas in his sculptures rather than purely formal relationships. The theme of Prometheus emerged as early as 1933 in his work, as a symbol of human progress and determination and a parable for the triumph of democracy over fascism. In the Greek legend, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it as a gift on humankind. This so enraged the god Zeus that he had Prometheus chained to a rocky mountainside, to be tortured by a vulture for all eternity. In Lipchitz's sculptural version of the story, however, Prometheus triumphs over his fate: freed from his chains, he strangles the bird with one hand as he grips the claws in the other. The original version of Prometheus Strangling the Vulture was a 30-foot work cast in plaster for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. After the artist resettled in America, the Brazilian government commissioned him to sculpt another Prometheus for the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro. The Walker sculpture is based on this 1944 version, which was recast in bronze in 1953.

A belvedere--"beautiful view" in Italian--is a structure built to command a view of its surroundings. Jackie Ferrara's stylized architectural work for the Garden holds court in the southwest corner of the grounds, where it serves as a reception, performance, and seating area for visitors as well as an object of contemplation. Ferrara's sculptures, whether tabletop sized or of grander scale, are exquisitely crafted meditations on timeless architectural forms. Here, the pylons laid out on a T-shaped floor plan suggest an Egyptian temple. The solid, elemental geometry of the piece contrasts with the delicacy of its surfaces, where complex patterns emerge from the varying lengths and shades of wood and from the play of light and shadow that embellishes the interior spaces.

British artist David Nash has been making sculptures from trees since the late 1970s. An ardent environmentalist, he uses only trees that have fallen or cuts fully mature specimens to open space for new growth. He then uses the wood as completely as possible, including the twigs and scraps, which are reduced to charcoal for his drawings. This work for the Garden was made from two white oaks found near Taylors Falls, Minnesota. Nash fashioned the stripped branches and trunk into an open square frame supported on three "legs," its sections joined in tongue-and-groove fashion and secured with wooden pegs. The resulting structure allows visitors to frame idealized views of the surrounding land and cityscape, reminding us of the role art can play in unifying man and nature. In 1994, after the wood's natural aging had turned the sculpture a pale gray, Nash charred its surface with a propane torch to embolden its sculptural line and provide a new seal.

Brower Hatcher was trained in engineering and industrial design before he turned to sculpture in the early 1970s. In his stone and steel-mesh sculpture for the Garden, he melds the logic of an engineer with a visionary's impulse to transcend time and space. A futuristic dome, composed of thousands of flexible wire polyhedrons, rests atop six mock-Egyptian columns in a blend of ancient and modern architectural styles. Embedded within the structure and seeming to hover in space are an assortment of common objects and abstract forms: a table, a ladder, a chair, a turtle (whose patterned shell recalls the gridded structure of the dome), random letters, numbers, discs, and dashes. Hatcher offers up these private symbols for universal interpretation, as viewers are inspired to construct their own meanings from the galaxy of images suspended above them.

Throughout her work, Judith Shea has used clothing to explore the nature and history of sculpture. Trained as a fashion designer, she soon found that field too restrictive and abandoned it in favor of sculpture, using clothes at first as abstract forms and, later, as surrogates for the human presence itself. By the mid-1980s, she began to place her figures into groups, suggesting psychological relationships among them and the possibility of a story. The three symbolic presences of Without Words are a rumpled raincoat, a spare and elegant dress, and the fragment of a classically molded head. This haunting trio seems to be carrying on a dialogue about modern life and antiquity. The head was based on an Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty sculpture of Queen Tiye; the dress is reminiscent both of archaic Greek statuary and the sleek couture of the 1950s; the coat is modern, yet recalls the flowing drapery of classical sculpture.