Months ago artists selected the 2026 Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay State Park show’s theme — “Edge.”
It appears a prescient selection for the storied show’s 26th year given the rare September nor’easter poised to lash coastal Massachusetts with rain-soaked gales.
The tempest is arriving on the doorstep of the outdoor event’s first full weekend and organizers have postponed Sunday’s opening reception for a week.
As the nor’easter bears down on coastal Massachusetts, the Maudslay “Edge” theme is all the more fitting what with Sunday’s postponed reception and artists scrambling to wrap, reinforce or temporarily remove vulnerable installations.
Meanwhile, the Maudslay event’s longstanding characteristics remain in place: temporary art, weather, landscape, public and a historic Newburyport park.
Sculptor and event organizer David Davies thinks of the annual fall exhibit at Maudslay as a play.
“Maudslay is the stage, and these sculptures are the performers for a brief period of time,” he said.
Nature always has a role in the show, more so this year and at a time when the Northeast is experiencing more intense storms due to the warming climate, according to weather researchers and the nation’s National Climate Assessment.
Show organizers have told the artists whose work may be vulnerable to take precautions or temporarily remove their pieces, said Davies, who spent part of Thursday helping artists cover their pieces in a tarp.
This won’t be the first Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay to weather a nor’easter.
Sculptor Joyce Audy Zarins, who grew up in Lawrence, has written a book about the event, “Site-Specific: 20 Years of Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay.”
“One of the challenges of exhibiting outdoors is facing whatever nature brings,” she said.
Her ’Meanders’ installation shown in the 2000 exhibit was inspired by a warm January day when she and her husband kayaked with the outgoing current on the Merrimack in black water silvered by ice and encountered a fog, surrounded by water in its three forms — solid, liquid and gas.
They installed the large sculpture on a Saturday, back when the show took place in spring.
The following Wednesday, June 6, a nor’easter blew through Maudslay, rearranging the set.
“Like everyone, I got to work repairing the damage,” Zarins said. “I bought some heavier stock, straightened and reinforced the supports, and put ‘Meanders’ back together.
“It remained upright for the remainder of the exhibit, and provided a lesson in the power of nature to affect us all.”
Northern Essex Community College art professors Dianne Pappas and Jenn Houle and other artists improvised defenses to protect their installations in advance of this weekend’s storm.
“We literally were taking plastic wrap and wrapping it around this giant tree to keep things secure,” Pappas said.
Her interest in transforming materials and Houle’s conservation and habitat ideas fueled their collaboration.
Their project took root over lunchtime conversations last spring in the Haverhill campus cafeteria.
This year, 56 displays will be up through Oct. 16, right up until “Maudslay is Haunted,” the annual spooky trail hosted by the resident Theater in the Open troupe.
(Occasionally, Maudslay State Park visitors report seeing ghosts on the 450-acre former estate of the Moseley family bought in 1985 for $5 million and managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation.)
Unlike ghosts, outdoor sculptures are physical objects made for being seen or otherwise experienced in the open air where they typically interact with nature — and viewers.
Another Maudslay sculptor with Haverhill connections is Rochelle Perry-Platine; she lives there.
It’s her 12th year showing at Maudslay.
Her work is called “Living at the edge of time: the domino effect.”
On Friday afternoon she was headed to the park to assess whether she needed to take the work down — and reinstall it after the storm.
She has domino paths leading up to a dead cedar tree trunk with cuckoo clocks on branches set at one minute to midnight. She has painted two branches red.
Larry Elardo of Groveland has entered works in the show for eight years.
This year’s piece, called “on edge,” is made of rigid foam covered with fiberglass and resin.
He expects it will weather the weekend storm.
“This is one of the few shows in the area where artists have the opportunity to show large-scale work in a public setting,” Elardo said.
“I often meet people months after the show that tell me they love this show and wish there was more of this kind of art presented in the community.”
Over the years some 350 artists have installed 1,000 sculptures at the outdoor exhibit.
Like many plays, Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay is visited by critics, Davies said.
There are those who love it and others who say, “What are you doing in our park?”
But even those in the second camp might get a new perspective and come away looking and thinking about natural settings differently after seeing the temporary park sculptures.
Add outdoor sculpture to Maudslay State Park’s lush and varied setting, and characters appear.
They may be woody, steely, rocky, plastic or gauzy.
They may be silent.
They may be standing or waiting in the wings, arching, bending, billowing, crawling, swimming, swinging, tunneling or trumpeting.
But the ensembles invariably enliven and enchant the park’s lawns, hills, fields, trees, rocks and reflecting pond.
The natural setting includes majestic stands of white pine.
Here are 100-year-old trees, gardens, meadows, stone arch bridges, carriage roads and a reflecting pond.
As the Northern Essex professors have protected the three stations in their “Receivers of Light” project, they are exercising resiliency and caution to protect their sculptures’ ideas about nature and interconnectedness.
Meanwhile, they and the other artist write the latest chapter in a storied tradition of public art at the state park on the Merrimack in Newburyport.