Musical performance under the Amphitheater at Nichols Arboretum.
Visual and performing arts are important creative activities that help visitors perceive, question, and understand an artist’s message. As a unit of a major university, the Gardens is a place where student and faculty artists may present their voice and work for public comment – some of the works are specially commissioned for precise locations. The Gardens profoundly supports this artistic creativity. All works on display have been vetted through faculty review, a select few are on permanent display.
Daffodils continue to make their yearly appearance in this art installation from 2004. Susan Skarsgard, a graduate student, imagined a half-mile long line of daffodils marching up and down the Arb’s hillsides. Scores of volunteers planted 10,000 bulbs in the fall of 2003 to make this project a reality.
http://www.imagine-align.org
Two sculptures made from the stumps of ash trees are in the heart of the Nichols Arboretum. Landscape architecture student Jana Vanderhaar and Jeff Plakke were inspired by animal sculptures in children’s gardens in the Netherlands and realized the death of the ash trees from the emerald ash borer presented a unique opportunity. Jana and Jeff were the chainsaw artists – as the work progressed the two figures emerged as squirrels.
For several weekends in June, the Arb is home to a Shakespeare play directed by Kate Mendeloff, lecturer in the U-M’s Residential College. The players and audience move throughout the Arb, where scenes are acted in settings that best display them.
- Landscape Architecture Student Sculptures
Five grad students in Landscape Architecture, given a class assignment to create an intervention with the landscape in order to better understand it, created this display. They placed burrow ridden slabs taken from trees killed by the emerald ash borer against the trunks of trees that were still alive, but showing signs of infestation. Then they posed this question – “Imagine how the landscape will change when all the ash trees are dead?”
