July 6, 2003, Sunday
ARTS AND LEISURE DESK
ART/ARCHITECTURE; Easter Island In Upstate New York?
By PHILIP GEFTER (NYT)

DON'T worry if, while driving through the rolling landscape of Columbia County, N.Y., you are suddenly confronted by an outsized, gleaming fiberglass human head. The heads, by the artist Philip Grausman, are among 70 works by a variety of artists newly installed on the 50-acre Sculpture Fields of the Art Omi International Arts Center in the town of Ghent.
Mr. Grausman has been working with the human head as a subject for several decades and imagines, eventually, a forest of heads dotted across a field. ''When you think of the size of an actual human head, it might be 10 to 12 inches,'' he said. ''Over the years, my heads have grown larger.'' ''Victoria,'' with the long neck (left), is 14 feet tall. He said the experience, for an adult, of standing next to one of his looming heads was not unlike that of a small child standing next to a parent. Mr. Grausman has worked with stainless steel and aluminum, but his use of white fiberglass, a modern material, alludes to the way marble retains light in classical sculpture.
Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem, curators of the Fields, consider them public grounds for viewing contemporary sculpture. The official opening of this two-year installation is July 20, when the public can roam the studios of the 30 artists in residence at the 11-year-old Art Omi. PHILIP GEFTER