Montalvo’s outdoor art stays on view during pandemic

While its concert series was silenced by the Coronavirus, Montalvo Arts Center is still open to visitors in need of a visual arts fix.

The Saratoga venue finds itself in this enviable position thanks to the hiking trails that wind through its 175-acre grounds. The trails are maintained by the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department and so are open to hikers who maintain a proper social distance from each other.

Along these trails and on the grounds surrounding Villa Montalvo, hikers can get an eyeful of art installations while getting outdoor exercise. The villa itself is closed to the public while the “shelter in place” order is in effect.

Several of these art installations were created for Montalvo’s annual Art on the Grounds exhibitions, which bring in local and international artists each summer to develop site-specific works around a theme.

For “We the People” in 2018, composer Howard Hersh created “Four Bridges,” a soundscape visitors can listen to via a smartphone app while they hike Montalvo’s grounds.

“The sound is inspired by the environment you pass through,” Hersh said. “Part of the woods is very tangled and dark. … I imagined voices calling out—the politically or religiously oppressed.”

Hersh equated these voices with those of Chinese immigrants who came to California through Angel Island only to be detained. Some of their stories are recounted in “Four Bridges,” which also includes recorded testimony from a Holocaust survivor, along with clips of music and poetry.

For her “We the People” work, Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons enlisted volunteers to help plant a peace garden in the border garden of Montalvo’s great lawn.

The layout of the garden, which Campos-Pons titled “imole blue ii. field of memories,” is based in part on the floorplan of a “typical” Silicon Valley home and in part on an aerial photograph of Soviet medium-range ballistic missile installations taken during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In the photo, the installations’ layout resembles a mandala, with missile silos appearing as blossoms within it.

“It doesn’t look military,” said the artist. “It looks very beautiful, so innocent and mystical, so removed from what it really implies.”

The theme for last year’s Art on the Grounds exhibition was “Threads: Weaving Humanity” and featured four newly commissioned textile works designed to spark conversation about human connections.

Los Altos artist Sudnya Shroff created “A Common Thread,” a participatory installation still on view in Montalvo’s Linden Grove. Visitors can add to the hundreds of crocheted flowers Shroff created in collaboration with the refugee community in Greece.

“In providing skeins of multicolored yarn and needles to my talented multifaceted refugee sisters—who otherwise spend their time counting long torturous days in flimsy crowded tents, at the mercy of inclement weather and fellow humans in power—my hope is to help them create space where they have none,” Shroff said in her artist’s statement.”

British artist Bruce Munro may have pulled up most of the lighted stakes and other materials used in the 10 installations that made up his 2018-19 exhibit at Montalvo, but he left behind two works in the historic villa that can be viewed from outside.

“Stories in Light,” which ran from October 2018 through March 2019, featured works inspired by “Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the third book in C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia.”  When he first visited Montalvo in 2016, also the artist was struck by the grounds’ resemblance to a house and garden that feature prominently in that book.

What cemented Munro’s connection between Montalvo and the Dawn Treader was a stained glass window at the back of the villa that depicts Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s galleon the San Salvador. Munro backlit the window, turning it into a psychedelic light show.

Visitors can peer into the solarium that overlooks the front veranda and the trees alongside the great lawn to get a glimpse of Munro’s “Light Shower,” a cascade of glass bulbs that shimmer in the direct sunlight they receive. This permanent installation at Montalvo is one of several site-specific “Light Showers” Munro has created in the US and the UK.

Montalvo’s grounds at 15400 Montalvo Road in Saratoga are open to hikers daily from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For information about all the artworks on view, visit  http://montalvoarts.org/artonthegrounds.