Niki at the Garden

If you’re coming to St. Louis this summer, be sure to make a special visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden. Through 31 October, the garden is featuring the work of pop-artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

Sprinkled throughout the garden are forty ‘larger-than-life mosaic sculptures’ adorned with glass beads, pebbles, mirrored fragments, and ceramic tiles. All are beautiful, and kids are welcome to climb on, up, and through some of them:

‘Fantastic animals fill Niki’s work. She felt the part of her that stayed a child was the artist, and loved to see children playing on her sculptures.’

In my opinion, the centerpiece of this exhibition is the six-ton, fifteen-foot tall La Cabeza, a grinning skull covered in golden tiles with teeth as big as your head.

There’s something wonderful about seeing your son grinning from inside a grinning skull. In a way that’s neither psychotic nor morbid.

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