A rust-colored ribbon of steel snakes through the meadows at Glenstone Museum. 223 feet long and 15 ½ feet high, walking alongside it feels like gliding past the hull of a gigantic ship. Hawks perch there, deer graze nearby, and native meadows and woodlands hug the sculpture on both sides. How did it come to be at Glenstone? 

Contour 290, 2004 was Glenstone’s first site-specific commission, meaning that artist Richard Serra was invited to visit the grounds and propose a work in response to the landscape. Upon visiting Glenstone, Serra was taken by the topography of the site and identified a stretch of meadow adjacent to the forest, admiring a particular gully in which trees were growing.  

He later remarked: “I was very interested in how this field undulates down... What I wanted the piece to do was to follow one contour and curve its way through the swale, so that it would stay level to itself.” In order to “stay level with itself”, Serra proposed the piece would follow the topographical line of 290 feet above sea level, curving through the landscape along that line.

How does a work like Contour 290 go from idea to execution? Sketches, scale models, and computer models were integral to visualizing the scale of the work and its curves in response to the landscape.  After the artist approved the scale model, a German steel plant began manufacturing the sculpture. Large plates of weathering steel were template cut and then slowly and methodically bent to match the curves designed by Serra. Once the full suite of steel panels was finished, the plates were shipped to New Jersey via cargo freighter and brought to Glenstone by road.  

While the piece would theoretically stand on its own, it is mounted to a concrete base below the soil for several reasons: stability in case of a tectonic event, local permitting requirements, and prevention of shifting mass due to freeze and thaw cycles in the soil. Once this concrete base was placed, the plates were installed by a skilled team of riggers from BUDCO Enterprises, Inc.  

Serra noted after the piece was installed: “If you come in from the road and you look at it, it really snakes through the ground... On the other hand, when you’re frontal to it, it really flattens out and it almost seems to crest in the center.” Visitors approach the work from numerous angles on Glenstone’s grounds – from the Woodland Trail, Gallery Road, or coming up from the path near Tony Smith’s Smug – giving many ways to look at the work from all sides.

In 2016, Serra’s studio reached out with a request. According to Landscape Architect Adam Greenspan of PWP, “The artist had a desire for there to be a bigger mix of species, something that’s more natural and more like the woods.” The five original sycamore trees planted near the sculpture were maturing and looked a little too manicured and disjointed from the 2003 woodline extending from the gully. In keeping with the original intent of the piece, Serra asked if Glenstone would alter the planting to the work cutting through a gap in an existing patch of forest, similar to what existed when the piece was being conceptualized. Glenstone and PWP Landscape Architecture worked together to replant the site in line with Serra’s vision. Existing sycamores at the sculpture were transplanted to the path just outside of Glenstone’s Café and are still thriving.  

Today, the sculpture sits amid dozens of acres of Glenstone’s established native meadows and is surrounded by native trees.  Sycamore, maple, tupelo, eastern red cedar, and other trees provide a continuous line of native forest that the piece bisects. The native meadows surrounding the work host innumerable insects, birds, and other creatures. The metal itself continues to age and change – its weathering steel building up a patina of rust that will evolve with time. 

Contour 290 was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration with Richard Serra – Glenstone also installed Sylvester, 2001 outside the Gallery and created a standalone structure to house the artist’s Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, 2017.