Only Kansas City could turn lawn ornaments into icons. Scattered across the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s sculpture park sit four giant badminton shuttlecocks — 18 feet tall, 5,500 pounds each — as if a game of the gods had paused mid-rally.
Created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in 1994, the Shuttlecocks playfully treat the museum building as the net, and they have become the city’s most beloved works of public art: graduation photos, marriage proposals and skyline postcards all orbit around them.
The surrounding Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park spreads 22 acres of green with more than 30 sculptures — Henry Moore bronzes reclining on the lawn, works by Rodin, Noguchi and Roxy Paine’s gleaming steel tree, Ferment.
The park is free, open whenever the museum grounds are, and at golden hour, with the shuttlecocks glowing, it may be the happiest photo in Kansas City.
