Joseph Bigley III was cruising along a curvy and pastoral stretch of NC Highway 268 near Happy Valley, north of Lenoir in Caldwell County, when he spotted it — a sprawling field of native grass and weeds set against a beautiful backdrop of rolling hills. Next to it was a stately brick building that once served as a boarding school and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Behind the old school were dormitories that had been converted into apartments. Bigley’s then-girlfriend lived in one of the units, and he’d driven from his home in Georgia to visit her. As he scanned the area — the wide-open space, the hills, the old campus buildings, a small fishing pond — his first thought was: sculptures. Big, colorful, three-dimensional works of art.

Joseph Bigley, executive director of the WNC Sculpture Center and Park, created Lune from cast iron, brass, and steel. In Bigley’s view, what he and his team are doing outside Lenoir underscores his belief that art can challenge how people view the world and their own interaction with it. photograph by David Uttley

Seven years later, Bigley, dressed like a blade of grass in brown shoes, tan jeans, and an olive-green blazer, stands at the edge of the field, waving his arm across the expansive landscape. It’s now dotted with rusting towers of steel. Wiry, skeletal structures. Roses and mermaids made from metal. A pillar of pots and pans. A whirligig. A Victorian-looking woman with a futuristic face. Bigley has transformed this natural setting into the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center and Park — about 12 acres of land that include his field of sculptural dreams, a half-mile sculpture trail, a 10,000-square-foot workspace, and a total of nearly 100 pieces by artists from North Carolina to Canada and Puerto Rico.

“To work with this backdrop is so ideal,” Bigley says. A graduate of Appalachian State University and Alfred University, he taught art at Spellman College in Atlanta before returning to North Carolina to realize his vision. Now, he’s back at App State, teaching and bringing together artists and art lovers alike in this rural environment that’s better known for big barns and oversize tractors than for sculptures of giant fingers with painted nails. As he walks along the park’s upper ridge, he gazes across terrain so vast that many of the sculptures appear tiny against the mountains and sky. “It’s amazing how even a 10- or 12-foot piece gets kind of swallowed up in this landscape,” he says. “My hope is to get a few 20- or 30-foot works out here in the next couple years.”

Ayden sculptor Carl Billingsley created Twelve out of steel. photograph by David Uttley

Another hope is to further integrate the artistic pieces into their agrarian setting by creating workshops that marry sculpture with nature. “What we’d like to do is showcase more of an intersectionality between art, agriculture, and the natural environment,” Bigley says. “Have some native plant gardens, maybe some vegetables, some flowers, and that sort of thing. Maybe do a welding workshop, where people can build a little trellis and then we can talk about the different native and edible plants you could grow on it. Or a ‘build your own birdhouse’ class, where we can talk about native bird species while students are working on them.”

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The founders of the Patterson School likely never envisioned the grounds of their campus as a sculpture park, but it somehow makes sense. Established in 1909, the school’s mission was to teach students how to work the land. They would get up early in the morning to milk cows, plow the fields, and help construct new school buildings and furniture for classrooms. By the 1960s, the school’s focus had turned to college prep and diversifying its student body, accepting kids from around the world. It eventually gained a reputation as a basketball powerhouse, with former students moving on to the NBA and WNBA.

Mermaid, another piece by Corky Corrado, has since been sold, but the New York artist is no stranger to North Carolina. Nearly 30 miles south of the park, in Hickory, Corrado has a nine-foot metal sculpture he calls Joy Ride. photograph by David Uttley

Then, in 2009, exactly 100 years after its founding, the school closed its doors due to financial problems. Today, the property is maintained by the Patterson School Foundation, its buildings and landscapes used for weddings, retreats, and an incubator farm, where people in the area can learn sustainable agricultural practices. What caught Bigley’s eye, in addition to that wide-open field, was the school’s old basketball gymnasium, which by 2018 had become weather-worn by years of neglect. “When I found out the gym was not occupied and that it was in such bad shape,” he says, “I approached the Patterson Foundation with a pretty comprehensive proposal.” The deal was that if Bigley and his then-partner, Zachary Smith-Johnson, could raise the more than $50,000 it would take to repair the roof, they could rent the space for a dollar a year and convert it into a sculpture center.

Step inside the mammoth gymnasium, and it looks at first like a giant storage warehouse: dark and musty, equipment scattered about the facility with no sense of rhyme or reason, basketball goals in disrepair folded back against the aluminum siding. But a closer look reveals new works-in-progress: dark strands of hard iron, twisted and textured like swatches of a thick winter sweater; a giant, looping pipe; small metal chickens. The walls are lined with tools used for sculpture.

“When I first got access to this place, there were thousands of holes in the ceiling. It looked like a planetarium,” Bigley says. “There were mushrooms growing out of the hardwood maple floor.” He stomps his foot against the surface. “Luckily, when we tore it up, it revealed this great concrete slab, perfect for what we do.”

Tom Risser, a sculptor from Waxhaw, made Embraced out of cast aluminum and flame gold stainless steel. photograph by David Uttley

What Bigley and his team — Education Coordinator Emma Finnen and resident blacksmith Marc Banks, along with a seven-member board of directors — do is provide space for creativity and an oasis for sculpture lovers to commune with art and the natural environment. For Bigley, the project began under rather stressful circumstances. He was still living in Atlanta at the time, traveling back and forth to the Patterson School to take care of business, and he and his girlfriend had a 1-year-old daughter. Then, within months of signing the lease in September of 2019, the Covid pandemic hit.

But the team soldiered on. Sculptors like Triangle-area artist Tripp Jarvis donated pieces to show outside the gymnasium. Muralist Brian Boles painted huge, colorful images of regional music legends like Etta Baker, Doc Watson, and Earl Scruggs on the side wall of a smaller building attached to the gym. A local scrapyard began donating and dropping off massive pieces of metal to be melted down and used by participating artists. Bigley acquired a refractory-lined furnace and began holding public iron pours — ceremonial events where the metals are melted down in a fiery display — featuring live music and food trucks. The sculpture center was becoming everything Bigley had dreamed it would be.

Hot Springs muralist Brian Boles turned a wall at the park into his own personal canvas to honor North Carolina musicians like Thelonious Monk, a Rocky Mount native who became one of the most prolific composers in jazz. photograph by David Uttley

“The idea of establishing a community of artists — whether it’s visiting artists-in-residence who come for a short duration or encouraging local artists to be part of the sculpture center more consistently — I really like that,” he says. “I like the communal nature of art. It probably stems from my time in academia — the kind of camaraderie that comes with teaching sculpture.”

The works displayed throughout the park include those by artists Bigley knows from around the country as well as pieces by local sculptors like Jim Weitzel, Ben Locke, and Bigley himself. Some of the pieces were shipped here, others created inside the sculpture center and moved outside, and still others were made on the spot where they currently sit. Among the most notable are Carl Billingsley’s Twelve, with its curving geometric shapes made from oiled steel; a beautifully textured piece of cast iron, steel, and wood by Cassi Rebman that alludes to North Carolina’s rich textile history; and the aforementioned giant pink fingers, For a Dollar and a Dream: Monument to Lost Wages, by Allison Baker. Her piece is the most conspicuous to drivers passing by the park. “It’s nice to have it near the road,” Bigley says, “because it really pops.”

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In a curve of Highway 268 just down from the Patterson School and sculpture park, past a farm with a big red barn and fields that extend to where the mountains begin, is a tiny church called the Chapel of Rest. A little farther down, in the direction of Lenoir, is Ripshin Goat Dairy. Farther down still is Happy Valley Optimist Park, where rural kids play baseball and families hold picnics. The Yadkin River runs parallel to the highway, hidden by the forest and farmland. This part of the Foothills, Bigley says, offered just the right creative recipe because of the confluence of farmland with Lenoir’s longtime collective appreciation for the arts.

“Certain rural areas may perceive artists in a way that inspires skepticism,” Bigley says, “but I felt like it wouldn’t be completely foreign here.” That’s because the Caldwell County Arts Council already honors sculpture in a big way: Since 1985, the county has held an annual Sculpture Celebration, in which winning artists receive up to $3,000. The top honor in 2024 went to Julie Slattery, an Asheville sculptor whose Here Where the Soil Was Bare was named Best in Show.

The flower-like Bloomin is the brainchild of mixed media sculptor Karena “Kidd” Graves of Greensboro. photograph by David Uttley

Bigley steps gingerly through the field and stops at a mass of red steel shaped like a rose. It sits atop a twisted stem of metal. On a placard below the piece, called Bloomin, is the name Karena “Kidd” Graves, who, Bigley says, “is a younger artist who was just at Arrowmont, a school of arts and crafts in Tennessee.” Part of the WNC Sculpture Center’s partnership with the Caldwell County Arts Council involves inviting young artists like Graves, who participated in Sculpture Celebration, to submit their works for consideration at the sculpture center. “After the Celebration,” Bigley says, “we bring some of those pieces here to showcase them.”

Forged pieces symbolizing human creativity and ingenuity. Hard representations of nature juxtaposed against the delicacy of real grass and trees and endless farmland. All set against the backdrop of silent hills, sculpted into the landscape by nature herself.

Western North Carolina Sculpture Center and Park
4612 Patterson School Drive
Lenoir, NC 28645
wncsculpture.org