When Chris Miller set out with fellow artists to walk through the outdoor sculpture installation at LongWoods Preserve in Cumberland, their group was trailing a family with small children. They couldn’t always see the kids in front of them on the wooded trail, but they didn’t need to in order to know what they thought.

“We could hear delighted squeals and screeches,” Miller said. “Now we know it is an unqualified success.”

“One Less Traveled” follows a winding path through 54 acres of farmland and forest in Cumberland. The sculptures by 23 artists will live on this land for two years. Joshua Reiman, an associate professor and the chair of the sculpture program at the Maine College of Art and Design, curated something that is as much an escape as it is an exhibition.

“Our mission was to make something that’s fun and whimsical,” Reiman said. “The political climate is so crazy. People are really stressed. We just thought, let’s make something fun.”

The result is exactly that. There are birds, small and large and futuristic. A fairy is suspended in the air. Figures and faces emerge from the ferns and the trees. There are spirals and stop signs. If the bell rings in the woods, will the headless scarecrow hear it?

“The theme of the show is about whimsy and wonder,” Miller said. “Those things can seem like escapism, especially in our current climate. There’s so much to rail against. It’s easy to forget what we could be striving and fighting for — to keep the joy and happiness.”

FOREVER LAND, TEMPORARY ART

Al Timpson has been dreaming of this exhibition for five years.

“I was sitting in a bar in 2020,” he said. “People were huddled around the bar, head down, barricaded in their phones. We’ve all seen it. I said, ‘Why can’t we have our free time be more multidimensional?’ I started figuring out where you could go to take a walk, be in nature, see art, hear music, eat good food and do it with friends and family. All those simple things could come together.”

So Timpson bought 60-plus acres in Cumberland. Most of the property is now preserved through a conservation easement with the Chebeague and Cumberland Land Trust and the Maine Farmland Trust. It is also home to Wander at LongWoods, a restaurant and event venue, and Whistle Cat Farm.

Timpson reached out to a friend at the Maine College of Art and Design to talk about a sculpture exhibition. He eventually connected with Reiman, who proposed an installation that would change every two years. Reiman visited the land in multiple seasons as he planned this show — the first time he has curated an exhibition outside. He considered exactly how the light would hit this piece or that one, where the winding path would allow a visitor to see a piece from multiple angles.

He really wanted the art to be based in the landscape, and now everyone will watch the landscape change the art. Moss will grow on the wood. Colors will fade. Ice will form and melt. Rain will run down surfaces and pool in nooks. Things might even fall apart, a prospect that excites Reiman.

“We’re finding out more about the landscape, but we’re also embellishing it with a new story,” he said. “Since this is a temporary exhibition, it’s also fleeting. It’s not going to be here forever. It’s not a sculpture that is meant to command a space forever.”

Still, some sculptures feel as if they’ve always been there among the ferns. But Reiman hopes that’s part of the magic of it all. How would one even get a functioning iron cupola or a towering metal spiral out there anyway?

“Very carefully and with lots of ingenuity,” Reiman said with a smile.

A MOMENT TO NOTICE

One of the first pieces a visitor will see near the parking area at Wander is a large granite sculpture by Jesse Salisbury of Steuben. He’s busy developing another large exhibition in Monson that also just opened, but he contributed a work to “One Less Traveled” in part because he wants to see more sculpture parks and outdoor exhibitions of this kind of work.

The path from Salisbury’s work (“In the Wind”) continues to “The Carrier Hotel” by Eleanor Brown, a student of Reiman’s who made a work next to the garden beds that is both intricate and functional. A little further into the field is “Luminous Twist” by Aaron T. Stephan, a Portland artist who has made large installation works in Maine and around the country. Reiman knows the story of each person and piece along the path.

“He put together a great group of artists,” Salisbury said. “I like the range of artists, from students who have just graduated to people in all phases of their careers.”

A while back, Jenny McGee Dougherty told Reiman that she wanted to try to make sculptural public art. She’s primarily a painter, and she had done murals, but she wanted to explore something new. Reiman, her colleague at Maine College of Art and Design, called her a couple of months later to invite her to participate in “One Less Traveled.”

She came up with her idea for this exhibition while traveling a different path — the highway between Montreal to her home in South Portland. While driving, she was studying the road signs. When she got home, she ordered a stop sign and a metal post on the internet. She liked the idea of walking through the forest and finding that familiar octagon. She ended up making three signs that mark the trail in different places, working with clay to form geometric patterns on their surfaces. The usual letters are gone, but the directive is the same.

“A big part of my practice is this idea of noticing,” she said. “I’m asking people to stop and take a moment to notice your surroundings.”

Every turn brings a new treasure — a flock of small wooden birds by Ben Spalding, aluminum faces suspended above the path by Ed Parrish Jr. Miller made a series called “Fish-Fowl of the Far Future,” and visitors can spot the “Grackerel” or even the “Reclusive Bald Sturgeon” in the trees.

“There is a lot of wonderfully fantastical thinking going on in the arts community in southern Maine, and the site itself not only lends itself to that but also will pull things in that direction,” Miller said. “It’s such a beautifully uncanny place to see works of sculpture and art. I wouldn’t want to understate the incredibly magical nature of that place.”

In the search for the next stop on the trail, the woods themselves take on a new quality. Look for Torin Porter’s “Dragonfly” flitting in the wind — and also for the tree split open by lightning. There is art all around.

“One Less Traveled” is located at LongWoods Preserve, 76 Longwoods Road, Cumberland Center. The trails are free and open to the public from dawn until dusk. The exhibition can be accessed from the Wander at LongWoods parking lot. For more information, visit wanderatlongwoods.com. 

This summer is all about sculpture. Here’s where you can find more outdoor exhibitions across the state.

MAKE SURE TO STOP IN MONSON

It’s not easy to find the right place to install 13,000-pound sculptures. But Monson was just the place.

“We had the ability to transform that little town into a sculpture park,” Jesse Salisbury said.

Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium worked with the Monson Collaborative to install five new works downtown this summer. The exhibition features pieces by Salisbury, Kazumi Hoshino, Tim Shay, Mark Herrington and Celeste Roberge. The sculptures will be in place for one year, and then the artists hope to travel them. Salisbury said an exhibition of this scale is rare in Maine, even though the state has a long history of sculpture, but he hopes these unique pieces can inspire more shows such as this one.

“What we wanted to do was to give funding to a group of artists to build their dream piece, to build a very ambitious sculpture that they normally wouldn’t be able to do,” Salisbury said.

James Pullen, studio technician at Monson Arts Gallery, said he hopes the striking pieces inspire people to pull over to inspect them more closely and then explore the town that has a long history of artmaking.

“It would be nice for people to come to Monson as an end point as opposed to just passing through,” he said. “We get a lot of people who stop in town on their way to the North Woods, but it’s nice that, in the past few years, Monson has increasingly become a destination unto itself.”

The exhibition coincides nicely with two gallery shows in town. Monson Arts Gallery is hosting “Quarries: Muse and Material,” which features smaller sculptures, paintings and photographs inspired by quarries. Down the street, the Gascoine Gallery has opened “Apex” with works by 15 artists on the theme of mountains.

An opening reception will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Aug. 8 at the Monson Arts Gallery. For more information, visit schoodicsculpture.org.

NEW ANGLES AT LANGLAIS ART PRESERVE

Langlais Art Preserve in Cushing is a 90-acre nature preserve with a 10-acre art environment at its heart. Visitors can see more than a dozen works made by Bernard Langlais between 1966 and 1977, and the majority are accessible via a quarter-mile gravel trail. This summer, the preserve is also hosting a temporary installation by a contemporary artist.

You can read more about Gina Siepel’s “Forest Geometries” in a review by Jorge Arango. Siepel installed five constructed sculptures along the 2.3-mile woodland trail, the culmination of a yearlong collaboration with the Langlais Art Preserve.

The grounds are open to the public daily, from dawn until dusk. Admission is free with a suggested fee of $10 per person for non-Cushing residents. For more information, including the hours for the barn studio and workshop, visit langlaisartpreserve.org or call 207-594-5166.