Heavy Metal

Child climbing on a large, green, textured outdoor sculpture in a wooded area with tall trees and rocks.
Sculpture art made of metal with rust and paint, featuring a figure with a flowing peach-colored garment overlook mountain landscape with green hills and blue sky with clouds.

Foundation. Pinnacle Mountain State Park, Arkansas, 2019 – 2024 Kennedy Yanko, Crystallized Tears. Linda Lopez, Untitled.

Heavy Metal is two permanent sculptures on the trails of Pinnacle Mountain State Park outside Little Rock: Kennedy Yanko’s Crystallized Tears and a cluster of integrated bronze pieces by Linda Lopez. Art at this scale had never been done on state park land in Arkansas. The Arkansas Parks and Recreation Foundation called us to ask what was even possible, and then hired us to guide the whole process. It took five years.

We started by talking. What had been done globally, what connected to this park, what kinds of work could get a foundation board, a state agency, and a park ranger to a common language and a shared vision. Then the real work: meetings with city and state government, with rangers and interpreters, walking the park until the sites made themselves obvious, the artist search, leading the selection committee with the board, bringing artists in to see the mountain, choosing the works, carrying the approvals through the state, and managing the commissions from every angle through installation, interpretation, and what comes next. The red tape was exhausting. It almost broke the project more than once. It is also one of the most interesting things I have ever worked on.

We chose Kennedy and Linda because they spoke to what the foundation was after: women’s voices, raised in nature. Kennedy’s work answers the tectonic history of the park, the rock and the pressure that made the mountain. Linda’s answers the small things, the detailed looking, the vast micro-ecosystems working all around you on a trail if you slow down enough to notice. Neither had made an outdoor work at this scale before. For Linda we went further and worked with her to cast in bronze for the first time in her practice. The results are beautiful, permanent, and never the same twice. They change with the light, the season, the weather. They will still be there long after the people who fought over them are gone.

And people did fight. When the works went in, a petition asked the state to stop; nearly three thousand people signed, and the local news ran the word “Beetlejuice.” I’d rather have that argument than none. Most of the people who stopped to argue had never had a reason to look at a sculpture before. Now they had one, in a place they loved, and they had opinions.

The Natural State is a slogan until someone asks what nature is for. A trail is a room. What you meet on it changes what you think a mountain is.

outdoor sculpture in state park
Older woman in a blue jacket and sunglasses touches a large, textured, yellow-green sculpture in a wooded outdoor area while two men watch.
Blue, rounded sculpture with protruding metal studs, mounted on a large rock, in a wooded area with trees and fallen leaves.
Outdoor sculpture made of metal and fabric on a white pedestal, with a landscape of hills and trees in the background under a blue sky.
A group of people installing a large, abstract sculpture outdoors on a concrete platform overlooking a river and wooded landscape.