This spring the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) commissioned its first major outdoor installation, a Stickwork by internationally acclaimed artist Patrick Dougherty. This temporary site‐specific installation is made entirely of saplings and constructed on the lawn of PEM’s historic Crowninshield‐Bentley House, at the corner of Hawthorne Boulevard and Essex Street in downtown Salem, Massachusetts. Dougherty organized volunteer corps of some 50 people to construct his artwork on site during the first three weeks of May. It opened for exploration on May 23 and is available to the public from 8 am to 6 pm daily, for approximately a year.

Stickwork: Patrick Dougherty is part of PEM’s Present Tense Initiative, which seeks to expand the museum’s engagement with the most vibrant creators and critical minds of our time. Responsive, reflexive and relevant, the initiative brings together visual artists, performers and cross‐disciplinary thought leaders to create experiences that reach far beyond the confines of the gallery walls.

Blurring the line between architecture, landscape design and sculpture, Dougherty’s installation ‐‐ situated one block from the museum’s main entrance ‐‐ provides a dramatic counterpoint to the highly finished wood‐frame Crowninshield‐Bentley House that dates to the early 18th century. The saplings (which include varieties of linden, Norwegian maple and beech) were responsibly harvested from areas on the North Shore with the guidance of a local arborist. Owing to the organic material and outdoor setting, Stickwork: Patrick Dougherty is a temporary installation.

“Patrick Dougherty’s creative process is both highly social and remarkably intuitive,” said Trevor Smith, PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense. “He improvises his Stickworks in response to the location and choreographs his teams of volunteers to help create his fantastic structures. Using the tapering forms of the saplings like a drawn line, Dougherty creates tension, direction and weight across the surface of the finished work.”

Over the last 30 years, Patrick Dougherty has created more than 250 Stickworks for museums, colleges, cities and parks around the world. Combining his carpentry skills with his love of nature, Dougherty uses rudimentary building techniques to experiment with tree saplings as construction material. In 1982 his first work, Maple Body Wrap, was included in the North Carolina Biennial Artists’ Exhibition, sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of Art. In the following year, he had his first one‐person show titled, Waitin’ It Out in Maple at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston‐Salem, North Carolina. His work quickly evolved from single pieces on conventional pedestals to monumental scale environmental works, which required saplings by the truckloads. His sculpture has been seen worldwide ‐‐‐from Scotland to Japan to Brussels, and all over the United States. He has received numerous awards, including the 2011 Factor Prize for Southern Art, North Carolina Artist Fellowship Award, Pollock‐Krasner Foundation Grant, Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship, Japan‐US Creative Arts Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Princeton Architectural Press published a major book about Dougherty and his work in 2009. For more information on Dougherty, visit www.stickwork.net.