MATERIALIZE

Programming: Saturday, June 6, 2026, 2-5 pm: Unveiling of Framework in conjunction with the artist reception for mycollective: Slow Growing in the Time of Trees.

Framework began as a site-specific sculpture created for the 2024 Farm/Art DTour in Sauk County, Wisconsin. It was built to highlight the environment and character of the surrounding landscape. The three rings support pieces of local ash wood which were felled as young trees after being infested by the emerald ash borer. They are now a recollection, helping to create a framework of wood, light, and space for you to witness and consider the history and meaning of a new place, the Lynden Sculpture Garden.

About the Artist

Matthew Vivirito lives, teaches, and maintains a studio practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Born and raised in Illinois, he lived in the western states of Colorado and California for ten years before becoming a full-time artist and educator. Matthew has created a diverse body of work responding to the varied places and environments he has resided within. His work is an exploration of materials, memory, and site-specific content responding to these environments.
www.matthewvivirito.com | Instagram @matthewvivirito

Programming: April 25, 2026, 12-4 pm: Kites Over Lynden
A celebration of spring, International Sculpture Day, and Earth Week.

This current installation at the Lynden Sculpture Garden is both a celebration for International Sculpture Day 2026 and a tribute to the author Ray Bradbury...a favorite of mine since I was a child. In 1943 Bradbury wrote "The Scythe," a short story in which he describes a farmer harvesting his crop of grain using a one-man scythe, similar to the ones I incorporated in this work. This tool is sometimes called a "cradle scythe," as it has those long wood fingers which stretch out to cradle the cut grain so it can be laid neatly in a row, all facing the same way.

In the story the farmer dies...and humans around the world stop dying. Another farmer receives a mysterious calling to undertake a trip to a destination where he has never been. He arrives to find the deceased farmer and is compelled to pick up the scythe and start harvesting the grain. Yes...humans start dying again.

Over more than ten years, I have acquired about nine of these cradle scythes. They are visually curious, antiquated, and unidentifiable by people younger than myself. I used a scythe in each of the three plots I built at Lynden as part of The Body Farm at Lynden https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/residency/gary-john-gresl-2022, a residency project I began in 2019 (and still visible on the western edge of the sculpture garden). These plots were studies of how Nature takes back what is hers...the sometimes slow process of retrogression. We all will pass.

This is the second sculpture tribute I have created to Ray Bradbury and his story. The first was a single unit exhibited last July at the Rahr-West Museum in Manitowoc.

About the Artist

I was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on May 12, 1943. My parents were of that group categorized as "the salt of the Earth." Dad left school after 5th grade to work on farms and factories. Mother completed grade school and began to work briefly in a factory, and then for her entire life as a housekeeper for hire.

Like so many other children, I was interested in art in its many manifestations, and over decades witnessed the term expanded to encompass creative objects from around the world and of many centuries and cultures. While I wanted to attend an art school, my parents' influence and "ruling" was for me to become a teacher. But during my years of high school and college, I managed to accumulate a fortunate number of art credits. I also attended night schools for art classes during the five years I taught elementary school, also teaching art for two years of that period. I received a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973, writing a thesis on "The work of Harvey Littleton in Relation to the Studio Glass Blowing Movement."

As an adult working in the antiques trade, I at last succumbed in the 1980s to participating in the Wisconsin art scene, joining the artist organization then known as Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors. I established an exhibit record, focused on assemblage sculpture, participated as an officer in WP&S, worked in various capacities as an "influencer" in the visual arts…and continue to be an "assembler."

Despite such headwinds I did manage to win some awards, be accepted into quality juried exhibitions, and gain some respect despite my shortcomings and limitations. I received First Place for an assemblage accepted into the Wisconsin Artists Biennial as well as receiving several other awards in exhibits. I was accepted thrice into the Wisconsin Triennial held by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and have had over a dozen solo exhibitions in Wisconsin. I won a Mary Nohl Fellowship in the Established category in 2007. I published a hardcover book about myself, titled Palimpsests and Middens – A Midwest Assembler. Over the years, I have secured several Suitcase Fund grants that helped me take my work to exhibitions outside the greater Milwaukee area, most recently to a retrospective at the Rahr-West Museum in Manitowoc.

I was amazed to receive a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award. I experienced a three-month Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Co. pottery. In 2017 I was selected for one of the residencies at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and over five years I created pop-up sculptures and one more long-lived work, The Body Farm at Lynden, which is still visible on the grounds. I continue to drop in from time to time to share new work.