Cranes and forklifts mix with art in sculpture garden renovation

Walk through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden this summer, and you'll see cranes and forklifts alongside the art.

Work is underway on a major renovation of the 11-acre site. This week, workers in hard hats showed up with pry bars and saws to begin the first phase of the project: Dismantling more than 40 very heavy works of outdoor art.

Tucked away in the northeastern corner of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is Judith Shea's "Without Words." The piece has been in the same spot since 1988, when the garden opened. It includes a rumpled raincoat and dress — both made of cast bronze — plus a fragment of a person's head sculpted out of marble.

Twenty-seven years later, Derek Rydberg performs surgery with a power saw. He wedges a flexible blade underneath the sculpture's limestone block base and gently cuts the thick steel bars that attach the stone to concrete footings.

Rydberg works for Rocket Crane. He and his crew members move deliberately, carefully slicing away the caulk that seals the gaps between the other dozen and a half blocks that make up the base. But before they pack up the pieces of "Without Words," they attach thick straps to the raincoat portion of the sculpture, start up their forklift, and slowly lift the 600-pound piece of metal off the base, lowering it into a wooden crate.

Overseeing this work — and the care of all the sculptures in the garden — is Joe King. As the Walker Art Center's registrar, King handles the logistics of moving artworks in the museum's collection when they're sent out on loan or, in this case, when they're put away in storage.

King says each sculpture in the garden presents a distinct challenge.

"No two pieces are alike, so it's not like removing bricks from a wall," he said. "And they're also extremely fragile and also valuable cultural assets that we need to handle with care."

King says custom-packing and moving these heavy and often complex works of art takes months of planning.hs worth of work."

This week, King's crew crated up many of the smaller sculptures in the garden. But there's a lot more work to be done. After Labor Day, they'll move Mark di Suvero's "Molecule," a tripod of red steel beams fitted together at obtuse angles.

One of the "Molecule" beams juts 38 feet into the air — and King said moving the sculpture will require two cranes. But it won't be put in storage; it'll be installed a few miles away at Minneapolis' Gold Medal Park, where it and two other sculptures will be on long-term loan. Other works are headed to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota.

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden renovation is a partnership between the Walker, which owns the art, and the park board, which owns the land.

Last year, Minnesota lawmakers allocated $8.5 million in state bonds for the project. The funding will cover most of the upgrades, including better wheelchair accessibility and better drainage — a stubborn problem on land that used to be a swamp. The Mississippi Watershed Management Organization kicked in another $1.5 million to upgrade the stormwater control system.

The transformation will be dramatic, Walker Executive Director Olga Viso said, by the time the sculpture garden reopens in 2017.

"There'll be new artworks, I think really distinctive artworks that will be a delight and surprise to people," she said. "But it's really the back part of the garden where the landscape will be really more reimagined."

The back part — the garden's northern end — will become a meadow, designed to collect stormwater and feed it to the pond surrounding the Spoonbridge and Cherry.

That famous centerpiece is one of the few sculptures that will stay put during the renovation. At three-and-a-half tons, it's too heavy to move, so workers will cover it up instead.

Workers expect to finish packing up the rest of the sculptures by fall, with major construction set to begin in the spring.