Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford

5 stars seems a bit high to me, but it’s a cool place to visit nonetheless.
My 9 year-​old son got a kick out of all the oversized wood-​carved schlongs adorning the sculptures.
I’m not sure I’d make a trip just to see the sculptures, but visiting Stanford is cool and stopping by the PNG Sculpture Garden makes sense.
4 stars.

Intricate and powerful. It blends seamlessly into the environment. Seamlessly arranged.

If you like New Guinea sculpture, this is the place for you!
I often walk my dog at the Stanford Campus, and stumbled upon this area by accident. These totem pole-​esk wood sculptures are very unique and interesting to look at. The intricate intertwining of the compositions appear to have spiritual nuances of animism and ancestral encomium. Set in a small grove of trees and landscaped with various tropical plants, adds to the authenticity of your visit. I Highly recommend viewing these great sculptures if you’re visiting the Stanford campus.

Nice little spot adjacent to the parking area for Lake Lagunita. Recommend coming on the weekend when parking is free and plentiful. The only thing I noticed is it is buggy so bring bug spray if you plan to linger.

relaxing…

This is a great FREE Bay Area day trip destination. About 2 dozen sculptures from Papua New Guinea nestled in an evergreen grove. Mostly they resemble totem pole type sculptures made of wood, which look amazing and surreal among the trees. There are also some stone carvings. All the artwork is traditional style detailing mythological figures and events. Not knowing much history of the place of their creation, they required interpretation, but the carvings are so intricate and beautiful! Definitely worth a drive from SF.

A very quiet and spiritual place to be in and reflect.

This Stanford sculpture garden is located on the main campus just shy of Lake Laguinita in a grove of trees. Near the lake, on this section of campus, is where there would be more built-​in protection to a site with this form of carved sculpture. The carving was done on site by a group of New Guinean sculptors in residence. Refer to the description by Glaciala A., the first Unilocaler.
So, I am sorry to have missed witnessing the process of the sculpting. What is visible in the sculptures is how the artists responded to being on campus and being in this grove. With the differing light levels filtering through the tops of the trees and angling through other openings, it can be diffcult to photograph the works here. From my visits are a few images that resonated at the time.
In the recent past, a frenzy of infill has been taking place on campus; as a consequence, this sculpture garden with its surrounding trees becomes even more significant. Thankfully, the garden is accessible to all who wish to be with the work.

Some places just fit perfectly into their natural surroundings as if they had been there for an eternity.
That is how I feel about this sculpture garden at Stanford, the most unusual and comforting and reflective place you are ever likely to discover on a 21^st century university campus. And it’s just blocks away from student dorms, dining halls, laboratories, classrooms, parking lots, and the rest. But when you are here, they just seem to fade away, as if they were merely figments of your overworked imagination. Like superficial marks temporarily tainting the land, they will soon pass into nothingness, slipping slowly into the void of failing mortal memory.
But somehow, this garden and its irresistible inhabitants feel like they will remain. They would appear to be built of sturdier, more sacred stuff. They were created when a group of stonecutters, woodcarvers, and artists from Papua New Guinea came to Palo Alto on the invitation of the university to decorate an otherwise uninspiring part of the campus. So these are not «exotic» or «primitive» pieces bought/​collected/​looted from the Pacific islands. They were constructed on-​site by modern masters of their craft, exactly for the trees and underbrush and shady open spaces that they found. That’s part of what I love so much about the garden: it is not a site for displaying ethnographic objects taken from their indigenous context. They BELONG at Stanford, they are PART of Stanford, they are natural and awesome reflections on themes shared by the whole of humanity: love, desire, despair, deep thought, lust, greed, danger, humor, and sadness.
The garden contains numerous depictions of animals and of humans and animals interconnected. Sometimes the images are frightful, exposed skeletons and less-​than-​subtle reminders of death. Others are maternal, and some are just plain adorable, like stone and wood muppets that Jim Henson would have be proud to have known.
There are so many images to be seen here, so many thoughts to run through your head, so many places to just sit down, relax, breath, and unplug from the WiFi world. I like to curl up on a bench next to the Thinker, who was loosely modeled on Auguste Rodin’s own version. Except this Thinker is more real, more approachable, you can see the wood cuts and sanding marks, he is naked and raw, wondering how the world will change next, trying to figure out his counter-​moves. He’s gorgeous. He’s inspiring. He’s my thought companion and lunchtime listener. You can read a good book with him watching over you, lost in his own world of dreams and desires (
).
Unilocal was meant for celebrating great things like this. And for sharing the secret with others. I hope that you have your own sculptured sanctuary of seclusion where you can slip away sometimes from the world for a few welcome moments. But if not, there is always room for a few more thinkers here, like me and my favorite Californian-​New Guinean friend (
).

The Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden is on Stanford’s Campus. It is located at the intersection of Santa Tersa and Lomita Dr. In 1994, ten sculptors from Papua New Guinea came to the Stanford campus for a five-​month visit. They created each of the sculptures that stand at the garden. There are over 20 works, made from tree trunks and stone.
There are placards located within the garden which describe the meaning of the sculptures and what they represent within the culture.
The sculptures are kind of hidden, in a grove of trees, which makes it uniquely eerily calm and serene. Bring a picnic lunch, there are tables.
They even created sculptures influenced by the Rodin bronzes near the Cantor Arts Center and the Main Quad.