Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park

The Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park is the 22-acre outdoor sculpture grounds surrounding the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at 4525 Oak Street in Kansas City, Missouri. Named in 2013 for Donald J. Hall Sr. — son of Hallmark Cards founder Joyce C. Hall and longtime chairman of Hallmark — the park holds the largest collection of monumental Henry Moore bronzes in the United States, alongside the iconic Shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and more than 70 works by leading 20th- and 21st-century sculptors. It is consistently ranked among the top museum sculpture parks in the nation and draws more than 100,000 visitors each year.

History

Outdoor sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins predates the formal park program, but the collection took its defining shape in 1986 when the Hall Family Foundation acquired 57 works by Henry Moore. The grounds were named the Henry Moore Sculpture Garden, and landscape architects Dan Kiley and Jaquelin Robertson redesigned the campus — terracing the south lawn and weaving the sculptures into new plantings. A broader Modern Sculpture Initiative launched by the Hall Family Foundation in 1992 rapidly expanded the collection beyond Moore. In 1996, reflecting that wider scope, the park was renamed the Kansas City Sculpture Park.

When the Bloch Building opened in 2007, the east lawn was integrated into the new architecture and the park merged with the adjacent Pierson Sculpture Garden. In April 2013, the Nelson-Atkins formally renamed the entire 22-acre campus the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park, recognizing Hall’s decades of philanthropic commitment to the museum. The following year, the Hall Family Foundation gifted its full collection of 84 Moore works to the museum outright, anchoring the park’s collection in perpetuity.

Donald J. Hall Sr.

Donald Joyce Hall (July 9, 1928 – October 13, 2024) was the son of Hallmark founder Joyce C. Hall. He became president of Hallmark Cards in 1966 when his father retired, and later served as chairman of the board until stepping into the role of chairman emeritus. Through the Hall Family Foundation, he directed sustained philanthropic investment in Kansas City arts and civic institutions across more than five decades. The sculpture park naming honored that legacy specifically in the context of the Nelson-Atkins — an institution the Foundation had supported since the 1986 Moore acquisition.

Major works

Henry Moore bronzes

The park holds the largest collection of monumental Henry Moore bronzes in the United States, comprising 84 works that span the full range of Moore’s career — reclining figures, upright forms, internal/external pieces, and working models. The collection includes Sheep Piece (on permanent loan from the City of Kansas City) and Relief No. 1, along with dozens of large cast bronzes distributed across the south lawn. No other American institution holds Moore’s work at this scale.

Shuttlecocks

Shuttlecocks (1994) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen — four aluminum and fiberglass-reinforced plastic badminton birdies placed as if scattered across the museum’s south lawn by a giant’s game. Each stands 19 feet 2-5/16 inches tall with a diameter of 15 feet 11-7/8 inches and weighs 5,500 pounds. Commissioned directly for the Nelson-Atkins grounds, they have become the park’s most recognizable image and a widely reproduced symbol of Kansas City’s civic character. For more detail see shuttlecocks-nelson-atkins.

Other notable works

The park’s broader collection includes works by Alexander Calder, Auguste Rodin, George Segal, Mark di Suvero, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Robert Morris, Andy Goldsworthy, and Robert Indiana (whose LOVE sculpture stands near the museum entrance). Roxy Paine’s towering stainless-steel Dendroid was installed in 2011, commissioned in honor of Martin Friedman’s twenty years as the Hall Family Foundation’s art advisor.

The Bloch Building integration

The Bloch Building, designed by Steven Holl Architects and opened June 9, 2007, extended the Nelson-Atkins 840 feet along the eastern edge of the sculpture park. Holl’s design — five interconnected glass “lens” structures — deliberately resists separation between building and landscape. The gallery level opens periodically onto the park as it steps down into the terrain, and green roofs over the galleries continue the lawn surface overhead, so visitors moving through the building are never fully indoors in the conventional sense. The addition effectively folded the east lawn into the museum experience and gave the sculpture park a continuous architectural edge from the original 1933 building to the far end of the new wing.

Visiting

The Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park is free and open to the public year-round during daylight hours, independent of museum admission. The grounds connect directly to the Nelson-Atkins galleries — visitors entering the museum from the sculpture-park side pass through the Bloch Building. Parking is available on the museum campus off Oak Street. The park is located in the Midtown Kansas City neighborhood; the Country Club Plaza lies roughly a half-mile to the south.

See also

nelson-atkins, shuttlecocks-nelson-atkins, hall-family-foundation, donald-hall-sr, hallmark-cards, midtown-kc