NEW ORLEANS.-  The much-anticipated Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden is now open at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Sculpture Garden has become the latest cultural destination for locals and must-see for visitors to the Crescent City. The world-class collection of modern and contemporary sculpture is presented in an incredible natural setting with delights at every turn.

A tremendous addition to the cultural life of New Orleans and the region, the Garden is a collaborative project of the New Orleans Museum of Art, City Park, and the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Foundation.

The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden is open to the public without charge, Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and is expected to attract 250,000 to 300,000 visitors annually.

Museum Docents lead guided tours of the Garden daily at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tours treat visitors to the wide variety of works that celebrate the many styles of modern and contemporary art. The accessible, casual setting enables residents and tourists, adults and children, art enthusiasts and new audiences to experience this world-class collection of modern and contemporary sculpture in a naturally inviting landscape.

The 5-acre Garden opened with 50 sculptures by such artists as Fernando Botero, Antoine Bourdelle, Gaston Lachaise, William Zorach, Henry Moore, Jacques Lipchitz, Barbara Hepworth, Seymour Lipton, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Kenneth Snelson, George Rickey, Elisabeth Frink, Masayuki Nagare, Lynn Chadwick, Louis Bourgeois, Jesus Bautista Moroles, George Segal, Deborah Butterfield, Alison Saar and Joel Shapiro. The sculptures, which are gifts from the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Foundation combined with works from the Museum’s permanent collection, are valued in excess of $25 million.

Forty-one of the 50 works on view in the Sculpture Garden may appear familiar to New Orleanians, as they were originally part of the Besthoff Foundation formerly on view at K&B Plaza on Lee Circle. For nearly three decades Sydney and Walda Besthoff have been collecting modern and contemporary sculpture. Their interest in collecting began in 1975 with the purchase of an office building in downtown New Orleans to serve as headquarters for K&B Incorporated, the family-owned retail drug store chain. Sculptures from the Besthoff Foundation were recently moved from their former home on Lee Circle, and make up the majority of sculptures in the sculpture garden.

What began as a crater-like hole in the ground in March 2002 has blossomed into an incredible garden—a garden of sculpture by major 20th-century European, American, Latin American, Israeli and Japanese artists.

The Sculpture Garden is situated on a beautifully landscaped site amongst meandering footpaths, reflecting lagoons, Spanish moss-laden 200-year-old live oaks, mature pines, magnolias, camellias, and pedestrian bridges. The Garden’s three entrances enable easy access from different areas of City Park. The gated main entrance and plaza flanked by two pavilions is located across Collins Diboll Circle (which encircles the Museum building) at Dueling Oaks Drive. Secondary gated entrances face The Pavilion of the Two Sisters and Botanical Gardens, and City Park’s Casino Building.

The path winds through the beautiful garden, over a shimmering lagoon filled with fish and turtles, past iris-laden shorelines where graceful herons pose and elegant swans bob in the water, underneath Spanish moss-laden live oaks that have looked out from this spot since the time of the Louisiana Purchase more than 200 years ago.

In front of each sculpture, the path changes from small to large pavers, so visually challenged visitors will know they are standing in front of an artwork. The paths connect a series of garden features including the Overlook Terrace, the Exedra at the end of one of the pedestrian bridges, the monumental Water Steps at one of the secondary entrances, the elliptical Sculpture Theater containing smaller pieces of sculpture and the Cascade Garden Pool containing Robert Graham’s Source Figure. The pathways also frame the elliptical Pine Grove immediately off the main entry plaza and the large Oak Grove Lawn at the opposite end of the Garden.

There is also a small cascading Garden Pool which encourages visitors to interact with the environment as they carefully make their way over the stepping stones. Visitors who stroll through the Garden will find themselves in awe of the beautiful setting and the incredible collection of modern sculpture. Two sculptures were placed in the lagoons, and a sculpture pool cascades down into one of the lagoon basins to visually bring the sculptures into the water, and the water into the Garden itself.

The carefully preserved garden design with its mature landscape and picturesque composition of curvilinear paths complements the works of art, creating smaller “galleries” within the garden. "Tree of Necklaces," a sculpture by Jean-Michel Othoniel commissioned especially for the garden, uses the spreading arms of a majestic oak to depict a common scene each spring in New Orleans, when tree branches along the Mardi Gras parade routes proudly flaunt the plastic beads thrown from floats long after the parades end.

The architectural team who designed the Garden includes project architects Lee Ledbetter and Richard Fullerton of Lee Ledbetter Architects, New Orleans, and landscape architect Brian Sawyer of Sawyer/Berson, New York. They worked together to blend the site into the existing old-growth landscape, highlighting sculptures in natural settings easily viewed from the pathways. The lagoon bisecting the Sculpture Garden was expanded and reshaped from a small stream into two large basins. The Garden uses City Park’s large meadow as a front yard, echoing the Museum’s visual relationship to its formal, tree-lined front drive

Ledbetter chose a modern architectural style for the Garden’s entry pavilions, architectural features and bridges. The design of the architectural elements complements the 1990 wings of the Museum facing the Garden and their simplicity serves as the perfect backdrop to the artwork. A pair of cast stone and bronze pavilions with clerestory windows marks the main entry to the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The pavilions, which face a large meadow adjacent to the Museum’s entry drive, flank a large plaza containing Henry Moore’s "Reclining Mother and Child." The pavilions and entry plaza also establish a centerline through the depth of the Garden that becomes an organizing element of the design.

When work began on the site, 140 pre-existing trees were carefully scrutinized for preservation. Seventy trees that were either diseased, dead or invasive were removed and replaced by 140 additional trees such as oak, cypress and several varieties of magnolia for a net gain of 70 trees. Special care has been made to preserve the beauty of the natural environment in every stage of the Garden’s design. The root patterns of the live oaks have been preserved in the design of the walkways.