The Stuart and Barbara Padnos Rooftop Sculpture Garden, just open at the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, 1000 East Beltline Avenue NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan, is part of the “Welcoming the World: Honoring a Legacy of Love” expansion project.

Located on top of the recently completed 22,000 square foot Covenant Learning Center, this space furthers Meijer Gardens’ mission of promoting the enjoyment, understanding and appreciation of gardens, sculpture, the natural environment and the arts.

“The Padnos Rooftop Sculpture Garden is a completely new garden experience. It will have an urban garden look and feel with stunning views of the wetlands,” said President and CEO David Hooker. “Our gratitude to the Padnos family is deep and sincere. They have supported a very broad range of cultural projects in West Michigan and beyond and we are honored to have a signature sculpture garden named in their honor. Stuart Padnos was an accomplished sculptor and we are fortunate to have several pieces of his work in our permanent collection. It is most fitting that this new garden carries the Padnos name.”

Central to the experience on the rooftop garden is the blending of horticultural elements and sculpture, including the siting of four long-term loans from the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Significant Modern and Contemporary sculpture from Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Marino Marini (pictured, above left) and David Smith will be on view.

This new rooftop garden consists of a clean, modern design that creates a distinctly urban space that highlights vistas to the wetlands and boardwalk areas that mark the eastern border of the Meijer Gardens campus. The area is visible from the interior sculpture gallery space, and the sculptures displayed will rotate over time depending on the sculpture exhibitions occurring inside. The horticultural elements of the garden have been designed to provide four seasons of interest.

The $115 million “Welcoming the World: Honoring a Legacy of Love” expansion project underway at Meijer Gardens is addressing facility needs that came from significant growth over the institution’s 24-year history. New areas across the campus will allow Meijer Gardens to expand annual horticulture exhibitions, provide more galleries for sculpture exhibitions and art storage facilities, add room for guests to move about safely and easily, host more events, add educational offerings, and create additional space that is LEED-certified and architecturally significant. The project is also adding parking capacity and improving vehicle flow.

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park served 696,000 visitors in 2018, and was recently listed in the top 30 most visited museums in the United States by The Art Newspaper, the leading publication in global art news. The 158-acre main campus features Michigan’s largest tropical conservatory; one of the largest interactive children’s gardens in the country; arid and Victorian gardens with bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin; a carnivorous plant house; outdoor gardens; and a 1900-seat outdoor amphitheater.

(Photo courtesy of Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park)