Sculpture Gardens

Joslyn Art Museum’s reimagined gardens are a series of dynamic open-air gallery spaces, set within a Sandhills-inspired landscape and highlighting the outdoor sculpture collection. These sculpture garden “rooms” are tightly intertwined with the Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion’s transparent entry atrium, establishing a layered experience of art, architecture, and landscape. Diverse drifts of plantings provide a unified composition of color, texture, and seasonal interest and offer potential for new habitat. Visitors may also follow a curved path from the Museum’s main entry northwest to the Discovery Garden. The path weaves through a new area of low rolling hills planted with prairie grasses and perennials selected to provide colorful blooms from early spring through late fall and beautiful structure for a snowy landscape in the winter.

The lawn at the base of the 1931 Joslyn Building’s Grand Steps is now refined, framed, and leveled to provide seating edges and a flexible central space for outdoor Museum programming, picnics, concerts, and tented events. The existing perimeter wall along Dodge Street to the south has been lowered—a symbolic and real manifestation of the Museum’s connection to the community.