SALEM — A well-established outdoor art exhibition has traveled to Salem State University, resulting in 10 outdoor sculptures being installed around North Campus and a full installation celebrating the exhibition at Salem State’s Winfisky Gallery from now to early October.
“Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay: 25 Years and Counting” is a retrospective celebrating a quarter century of outdoor public art created for Newburyport’s Maudslay State Park. The show arrives at Salem State during a sabbatical year for the Maudslay collective, which has organized an annual outdoor sculpture exhibition at the park for more than two decades.
In its absence from the park this year, Salem State University has carried the tradition forward through a dual presentation: an extensive gallery show in the Winfisky Gallery, and 10 outdoor sculptures installed across North Campus. The indoor exhibition will be on view through Oct. 3, while the outdoor installations will remain through mid-December.
For more than 25 years, Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay has been a fixture in the region’s cultural calendar. The exhibition is entirely artist-organized, with no jury process, giving it a uniquely open and democratic character. It has featured more than 950 works by more than 340 artists across its 25 years of exhibitions.
“What’s remarkable about this group is that they aren’t all artists—some are school groups,” said Ken Reker, an art and design professor at Salem State and long-time supporter and participant in the outdoor installations. “It’s a very democratic approach to artmaking. You can go through the park as a potential artist, look for any site you find intriguing, do some drawings and sketches of what you’d like to see in that space, and the Maudslay collective will help you realize it.”
Cynthia Schartman, one of the collective’s coordinators and a long-time supporter, said the outdoor program “is very unique, in that it’s one of the only un-juried, largely publicly accessible outdoor sculpture shows.”
“It was brainstormed by a small group of sculptors who really wanted a more playful, interactive experience, and they wanted to share the joy of making—the artistic process—with a broader community than just the artist community,” Schartman said.
The exhibition coincides and overlaps significantly with the inaugural running of the Boston Public Art Triennial, Boston’s first large-scale public art festival. Running every three years beginning in 2025, the Triennial’s synchronicity places Salem State’s retrospective around the Outdoor Sculptures at Maudslay within a broader regional surge of public art energy.
Two special events will also bring Maudslay artists and Salem audiences together. An artist talk will be held in the Winfisky Gallery on Thursday, Sept. 18, at 12:30 p.m., and an evening reception with the artists will be held Friday, Sept. 19, from 6 to 8 p.m., also in the gallery.
The Winfisky Gallery is located on the first floor of the Ellison Campus Center on North Campus, 352 Lafayette St., Salem. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, please visit salemstate.edu/winfiskygallery.