The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden

Augustus Saint-Gaudens's sculpture of the goddess Diana is one of the oldest works in the sculpture garden. Here, Diana balances delicately on her spherical base, seeming to defy gravity.

Modeled on Saint-Gaudens's longtime model and mistress, Davida Johnson Clark, Diana's keen sense of concentration gives a real human presence to an otherwise purely mythological subject.

Lynn Chadwick's Sitting Figures present a more abstracted view of the human form. Androgynous and inscrutable, these figures are reduced to sharp angular lines.

Chadwick believed that "art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by the imagination and translated by the artist's ability and skill."

Barbara Hepworth's River Form recalls a pebble gently swept along in the current, smoothed by the constant motion of water moving across its surface.

"All my sculpture," Hepworth once said, "comes out of the landscape--the feel of years as one walks over it, the resistance, the weathering, the outcrops, the growth, structures...no sculpture really lives until it goes back into the landscape."

Fritz Bultman's Barrier (Big Bird) is part of a series of sculptures inspired by the burning of ancient Troy.

Bultman's signature rough surfaces were created by cutting, burnishing, and weathering the plaster before casting in bronze.

Robert Indiana takes the word "love" from its usual place on the printed page, and transforms it into a larger than life, three-dimensional sculpture.

Indiana shows that art can be relatable and accessible to everyone by turning one of our most universal emotions—LOVE—into a work of fine art.

Rhona Pondick’s Monkeys are human-animal hybrids that ponder the nature of human evolution and the fragility of life.

Pondick sculpted the animal forms by hand, and used a digital scan of own head as a model for the human faces.

Leandro Erlich originally installed Window with Ladder, Too Late for Help in a vacant lot in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina as part of the first installment of Prospect New Orleans in 2008.

Erlich grew up in a family of architects, and his fantastical architectural constructions often point out inequality and injustice, and imagine how we might build a better, more just world.

Alison Saar’s Travelin Light explores the history of slavery in the United States. Named for a Billie Holiday song of the same title, the sculpture is also a bell that chimes mournfully when you pull a chain in the back.

Inspired by Japanese temple bells, the sculpture is a memorial to victims of violence and suffering all across the world.

Korean artist Do Ho Suh's Karma ascends to 23 feet, curving upwards like a spine in which each person acts as a vertebrae.

Each figure stands atop the previous one, demonstrating the interconnectedness of humanity, and how much we all rely on one another for support.

"The common misunderstanding," Suh says, "is that my work is a confrontation, a clash of cultures... It's more about interdependency and the way things coexist."

Hank Willis Thomas's History of the Conquest reflects on global histories of colony and empire.

Thomas based History of Conquest on a seventeenth-century miniature sculpture composed of a real nautilus shell covered in silver and topped with a black enamel figure.

Enlarged to monumental scale and cast in solid bronze, Thomas transforms a negative stereotype from the past into a monumental hero for the present.

Mexican artist Pedro Reyes’s Epicurus is constructed of volcanic stone, a material commonly used in the Ancient Americas to create sculpture as well as everyday tools and utensils for cooking—particularly metates for grinding corn.

Reyes’s sculptures encourage us to value everyday objects and experiences--particularly those that connect us to others such as food--as much as fine art.

Polish sculptor Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s sculpture Dumna, which in Polish means “proud,” towers majestically over its viewers.

Cast in bronze, the rugged, heavily patinaed surface evokes the roughly weathered tree bark or rock formations that often inspire the artist’s work.

Rydingsvard’s process is painstakingly physical, often involving cutting, chiseling, assembling, and laminating to give life to the intricate surfaces of her works. This labor is infused with traumatic memory and emotion, as much of Von Rydingsvard’s childhood was spent in Nazi camps and postwar refugee sites until moving to the United States in 1959.

Irish artist Sean Scully works exclusively with narrow color palettes and compositions, repeatedly stacking and interlocking different shapes and hues.

By keeping within such a limited range, Scully highlights the many layers of subtle differences that exist in the visible world.

Fred Wilson's two figures—one representing Ancient Egypt, and the other Ancient Rome—reflect on the interwoven histories of Africa and Europe.

Wilson purchased cheap plaster copies of ancient sculptures and had them cast them in bronze, covering the ancient Egyptian figure in a black patina and painting the classical Greco-Roman figure white.

The Mete of the Muse reflects on how our understanding of this history--which often valorizes Europe over Africa--has been shaped by larger racial and cultural biases.

The title of Gerold Miller's Verstarker 28 is loosely translated from German as “amplifier.”

Verstarker reflects and intensifies its surroundings visually in all directions.

Jeppe Hein is a Dutch artist who challenges the tradition of the passive viewer in art, activating his work with unconventional materials and technologies like mirrored surfaces and motion sensors.

In Mirror Labyrinth, Hein creates a circular maze of reflective panels that engulf us in a multitude of refracted images of ourselves and our surroundings, forcing us to work hard to find our way through.

Maya Lin’s Folding the Mississppi (1938), created specifically for The Besthoff Sculpture Pavilion, takes the meandering path of the Mississippi River as its source of inspiration.

Composed of hundreds of industrial marbles that bend and flow around the building’s architecture, the installation traces the entire pathway of the Mississippi River, from Northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

Teresita Fernandez's Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi) places New Orleans in a global context by drawing connections between scaled, geographic locations of continent, country, and city weaving the cultural, demographic, economic, and historical relationships between Africa, Cuba, and New Orleans.

The artist thinks of these connections as “stacked landscapes”- the idea that we are always in more than one place simultaneously. Here, landscape is understood as unearthing the hidden, post-colonial violence inherent in the landscape of the Americas and also includes the subterranean, the ancient, and the geological, not just the visible or the picturesque. It ultimately asks us to question who we are in relation to where we are.

Made of millions of hand-glazed and fired porcelain tesserae that have been meticulously assembled, the image comes from an actual malachite and turquoise mineral rock found in, what is now, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Elyn Zimmerman’s 70-foot glass bridge, created for NOMA, was inspired by WPA era maps of the Mississippi River that illustrated its changing course over time in swirling lines and stunning colors.

Installed directly over water, Glass Bridge - Mississippi Meanders shows us the layered history of New Orleans’s most defining geological feature, and also reminds us of water’s powerful proximity to our everyday lives.