The materials were already on site. Fallen trees, branches, mud, rocks pulled from the grounds of Laumeier Sculpture Park — the same acres of oak-hickory woodland that have held large-scale outdoor sculpture since 1976. This spring, those reclaimed materials were assembled into something the park has never quite had before: an amphitheater-shaped structure that is at once a habitat, a monument, and a working garden.
Begin Again: Wak'a Garden is a commission by Juan William Chávez, Laumeier's 2026 Visiting Artist in Residence, and Kiersten Torrez, the 2026 Kranzberg Exhibition Series Artist. It is the second installment in the park's Begin Again series, the curatorial thread running through Laumeier's 50th-anniversary year. The project debuts April 18, 2026, in conjunction with the park's Art & Nature Day, when visitors of all ages are invited to explore art, nature, and community through hands-on activities and creative play.
The word at the center of it comes from the Andes. Wak'as are sacred places, objects, or natural features — mountains, springs, stones — understood in Andean traditions to be living and communicative rather than inanimate. "Wak'as are entities," Chávez told St. Louis Public Radio's St. Louis on the Air. "They're viewed as living things, and they're also viewed as they can speak or talk, and they talk through interaction, through ceremony, through rituals, through tending."
That last word matters. A core principle in relating to a wak'a is reciprocity: humans offer care, respect, and symbolic gifts, and in return the wak'a provides guidance, protection, and alignment with the environment. So Wak'a Garden is not a sculpture you walk past and photograph. It is designed to be activated — by sound, movement, environmental signals, rituals, collective experience. It is a multisensory space for reverence, gathering, experiential workshops, and performances.
The physical form follows that logic. Chávez contributed ceramic hive-shaped vessels, intricate forms that nod to the pollinators the structure is meant to shelter. Torrez, a master gardener, shaped a chemical-free teaching garden based on her reading of the natural habitat — a four-season planting that the two artists will help cultivate and care for. The result is a habitat and sacred monument dedicated to native plants and pollinators, built from the park's own shed material.
For Chávez, the through-line is long. Born in Lima, Peru, and now based in St. Louis, he has spent years working at the intersection of art, ecology, and community. His 2012 Laumeier exhibition, Living Proposal: Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary 2010–2012, compared urban population decline with bee colony collapse disorder, exploring the overgrown acres where the Pruitt-Igoe towers once stood and where bees had quietly claimed the woodland. He has described the successful beehive as a metaphor for a sustainable community and an enduring civilization. His work with bees and beekeeping runs through pieces like Queen, an archival digital print in the collection of the World Chess Hall of Fame that celebrates feminine energy and power through the life cycles of bees. Wak'a Garden, in a sense, brings that decades-long inquiry home to a park.
Curator Dana Turkovic frames the installation as a distillation of the institution itself. "I see the wak'a garden as a sort of micro-environment that is a representation of Laumeier as a whole," she said, "and the concept and the mission of the organization is, in that space, very concentrated."
That mission has a specific origin. Laumeier Sculpture Park was founded in 1976. It became one of the first and largest dedicated sculpture parks in the United States, presenting more than 70 works of large-scale outdoor sculpture. The grounds are open daily from 7 a.m. until 30 minutes after sunset, and admission is free.
The 50th-anniversary year is themed "Where Wander Turns to Wonder," and it includes an anniversary exhibition, three new commissions, community storytelling, and a commemorative publication. At the heart of the Begin Again series is Begin Again: 50 Years and Counting, an exhibition drawn from the park's collections and archives — rarely seen drawings, sketches, studies, photographs, sculptural models, and maquettes that illuminate how five decades of commissions actually came together. Arranged chronologically by decade, it invites visitors to move metaphorically through time, and it centers on artworks that have come and gone and proposals that were never fully realized, embracing impermanence rather than pretending a sculpture park is fixed and unchanging. Over 50 years, Laumeier has supported more than 1,000 artists, including many women and artists of color at various stages of their careers.
Wak'a Garden sits inside that history while pushing against one of its conventions. Most of the park's sculptures are objects to be looked at, however monumental. This one is a place to be used — to sit, to listen, to plant, to tend. The park acknowledges the ancestral lands of the Osage Nation, Missouria, and Illini Confederacy on which it stands, and the installation's Andean framework asks visitors to reconsider their relationship with the land itself, emphasizing how care for a place can benefit the ecosystem and generate cultural and creative meaning.
There is also a sonic life to the project. On Thursday, October 8, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on the South Lawn, visiting sound artists will join Chávez and other local artists for a "sonic conversation" around the fire — a collective improvisation in response to Wak'a Garden and the wider landscape. It is free, and no registration is required. The event is a fairly literal enactment of the idea that a wak'a speaks when it is activated, and that the activation is a shared act.
For Turkovic, the anniversary year is a chance to hold two things at once: the preservation of known artworks and the introduction of new ones. "I really would like people to celebrate the history of the park," she said, "and just looking at what an impact Laumeier has had on everyone's lives in our region, in St. Louis, in our community."
Wak'a Garden will keep changing after the opening crowds go home. The planting is designed for four seasons. The vessels will weather. The structure, made of the park's own fallen trees and mud and rock, will slowly become part of the park again. That is arguably the point — a monument built to be tended, and to return what it is given.