What’s New? A Roundup of 2025 installations at Franconia Sculpture Park

What’s New? A Roundup of 2025 installations at Franconia Sculpture Park

Over 950 artists have come to make temporary public art installations at Franconia since 1996. Every time you visit the park things are different: the days and seasons change along with new sculptures created by artists-in-residence annually, works that last for years outdoors, and pieces that break down after being reclaimed by Mother Nature. 

Thanks to new support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and Terra Foundation for American Art, Franconia was able to offer an Open Call for artists-in-residence in 2025 with awards ranging from $5,000-$10,000. Emergency relief from the Windgate Charitable Trust, a matching grant from the Manitou Fund, and sustained operating support from the McKnight Foundation allowed Franconia to continue operating while losing nearly $300,000 in historically reliable government grants. 

Midcareer Artist 

Morgan Lugo’s Time is of the Essence is a functioning sundial and sculptural installation that mimics how the brain perceives and maps time and space while actively telling time in space. Built with three conceptual layers of mirrored stainless steel and laser-cut acrylic, the sculpture casts an almost 50-foot rainbow spectrum neuron map that shifts throughout the day, physically embodying the passage of time. The intention is to experience your own reflection layered with others’, to see yourself both within and outside of time. 

Emerging Artists

Martin Gonzales’s Prayer for Rain (Umbrella) is a Pavilion and Sculpture, an expression of and search for space. To be inside means others are outside. This space is for everyone, especially those cast out. As the USA escalates its white supremacist agenda, may this space serve the real work of holding ALL and rise above symbolic gestures.

Will Jewett’s Temporal Moment investigates the structure of time through engineered form. A tensioned circular frame embodies cyclical continuity, while a rigid beam bisects it, introducing a linear axis of past, present, and future. The meeting of these geometries translates abstract ideas into mechanical language—balance, torque, and force held in suspension. Temporal Moment frames time as both loop and vector, an equilibrium between recurrence and progression.

Shan Wu & Drew Cavicchi’s Afterimage uses a gobo projector, motor, electronics, and reclaimed pole to trace the passage of time through light and movement. By day, its form casts shadows that follow the sun’s rhythm. At sunset, a projector, programmed using a Solar Positioning Algorithm, projects the silhouette of the pole’s shadow as it retraces its motion through the day. Through this subtle choreography, Afterimage reanimates the dialogue between natural and artificial light, reflecting on our sense of time and space.

Fanni Somogyi’s Pleasure in the Confusion of Boundaries II explores the entanglement of ecological and industrial systems. Constructed from steel pipe and electroformed copper forms, it merges plumbing, roots and organs—suggesting biological and built infrastructures. By positioning industrial materials within a language of organic growth, the viewer is invited to ponder how nature and human intervention co-exist, overlap and evolve together. Over time, the copper’s patination reflects mutual transformation, imagining a future where mechanical and organic systems coexist and regenerate together.

Visiting Artists

Visiting Artists contributed to our vibrant landscape in numerous ways in 2025 via installations, performance art, exhibitions and more: 

Annette S. Lee’s Ancient Echoes: Keepers of the Sky explores the profound connections between sound, identity, nature, and the cosmos. Through immersive soundscapes and visual storytelling, the exhibit invites visitors to reflect on their place in the grand rhythm of the universe.

Torey Erin’s Star Field continued growing. Asters bloomed from the 2024 inaugural seed dance party. Torey completed the Hugelkultur mound, seeded the mound at the Two Eyed Seeing Symposium, and hosted another Seed Choreography in early November 2025 around the Hugelkultur, with participating DJs Ian Babbineau, Paul Creary, and noetic performance artist Orion Caliph.

Marvin Touré honored spiders with Kwaku’s /ɡrās/  and reimagined an ancestral vessel from his childhood with UAV 7845. 

Mike Mackiewicz and Katrina Nord took inspiration from Pink Floyd in 1987 with an installation and prairie burn entitled Learning to Fly – referencing the 1987 Pink Floyd song/video. 

Ryan Fontaine repaired his 2022 sculpture Imprinted Wave #1 v.2. Imprinted Wave offers multiple ways of thinking about a wave in movement, light, sound, and energy. 

Two dynamic cast iron sculptures re-emerged at our new stage outside the Visitor Center, from Ronda Wright (Watch Out di Suvero Here I Come, 2017) and Okay Ikenegbu (Untitled, 2015).

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We ask everyone who loves Franconia to contribute to our mission: to foster an inclusive community to create and contemplate contemporary art inspired by nature and our ever-evolving world. If just one in fifty visitors would give $20 monthly, we could reach our goal of hosting artist residencies year-round, providing over 50 artists each year a big step forward in an array of well-funded fellowships for sculptors, writers, performing artists, eco-artists, visiting artists, artist families, and the next generation of artist-leaders.

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Featured Image: Morgan Lugo, photo by Brent Snyder