Klaipėda Sculpture Park was established in 1977 on the site of the Old Town cemetery. The destruction of the cemetery lasted until 1985 – in the western part of the park, sculptures of modernist expression were already being assembled, while in the eastern part, along Trilapis Street, tombstones were still standing.
Currently, 116 artworks of various themes, sculpted by 61 sculptors and a large number of stone craftsmen, are displayed in the park area encompassing 10 hectares. During the fifteen years, in total 69 professional sculptors who decorated Klaipėda city with 131 sculptures participated in the symposiums.
For fifteen summers (1977-1991), the Klaipėda city authorities, Alfonsas Žalys, the chairman of the executive committee, and Nijolė Navogreckienė, the head of the culture department, together with the sculptors’ section of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association, organised granite carving symposiums in the town of Smiltynė.
The most important thing that the symposiums opened up at that time was the freedom of artistic expression. In the first symposiums there was no censorship. The submission of sketches to the commission began in the third year, when the park already had the following sculptures such as The Armour (1977) and The Flat Four-Legged (1978) by M. Navakas, The Beginning (1977) by L. Garla.
Although from 1979 there was a commission to which sketches of future work had to be submitted to and censorship had to be passed, one after another, modern sculptures that were not typical for public space at that time appeared in Klaipėda. Art strategies distant to the canons of socialist realism were formed and realised: abstraction, surrealism, minimalism, site-specific art. The Klaipėda symposiums were an opportunity to experiment, play, push the boundaries and interpret the relationship between reality and art differently.
The works created at the symposiums were presented at a ceremony in the park at the end of August. There, the republican authorities, the sculptors and the city’s cultural community gathered. A brass band performed. Sculptors were given diplomas and awarded with watches, silver trays and radios. Monetary payment also existed: the city would buy a few figurative sculptures, and the received money would be shared by the sculptors.
The Smiltynė Granite Carving symposiums have been the heart of Klaipėda’s summer cultural life for fifteen years, around which journalists, artists, officials and curious Klaipėda citizens revolved.
When Lithuania regained its independence, the territory of the Sculpture Park was regarded controversially. The Sąjūdis activists, especially the leaders of the Freedom League, explained that the Old Town cemetery had to be restored, while artists (Algimantas Jusionis, Algirdas Bosas…) and a part of the public said that the wheel of history could no longer be turned back – the Sculpture Park had to be preserved, without any of the sculptures in the park being taken away. There have been such proposals.
Today, Klaipėda Sculpture Park is an open-air art gallery of sculptures of Lithuanian mature modernism from the 1980s and 1990s. It is a place where we learn about the Lithuanian school of sculpture carving, interesting technical solutions (e.g., a homemade flamethrower was used to carve a stone mass), and the expression of the relation between form and theme. Eleven sculptors who participated in the Smiltynė Granite Symposiums are awarded the National Prize for Culture and Arts: A. Sakalauskas (1994), R. Midvikis (1994), V. Šerys (1995), S. Kuzma (1996), M. Navakas (1999), L. V. Strioga (2001), P. Mazūras (2004), K. Jaroševaitė (2005), A. Bosas (2011), V. Vildžiūnas (2012), V. Urbanavičius (2015).
Today, the territory of the Sculpture Park consists of several historical layers:
1. An early 19th century field fortification device left over from the Prussian war against Napoleon.
2. Fragments of the Old Town cemetery (1820s – second half of the 20th century), the grave of the rebels of 1923, the Second World War memorial. Tombstones of the philanthropist Julius Ludwig Wiener, Hermann and Marie Gerlach are restored.
3. Exposition of sculpture of Lithuanian Mature Modernism (1977-1989).
4. New commemorative signs (memorial stone of memellanders, memorial to the ship Linkuva, Armenian Khachkar).
Since 2005, the History Museum of Lithuania Minor has been taking care of the Sculpture Park’s exposition.
Prepared by Sondra Simanaitienė