Envision a national park, and you may picture an expansive, dramatic landscape such as the Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons or Great Smoky Mountains. Yet the U.S. National Park Service, which turns 110 this week, also stewards less rugged sites. At the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, behatted rangers help visitors explore a living tradition of sculpture.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who died in 1907, was a big-deal sculptor in the beaux arts era. He created the bronze relief memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the African American 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment on Boston Common, the first such monument to Black soldiers. His 12-foot “Standing Lincoln,” in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, is one of the best-known images of the former president. And his “Diana,” now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was once the tallest point in New York City; the goddess perched on one foot atop Madison Square Garden until 1925.
In 1885, Saint-Gaudens began spending summers in New Hampshire, where he established the Cornish Colony — a network of about 100 artists and thinkers who lived or summered in the area. They included dancer Isadora Duncan, painter Maxfield Parrish and president Woodrow Wilson. After Saint-Gaudens’ death, his wife, Augusta, established the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to preserve the home and studios. The nonprofit runs programming at the site, which was turned over to the National Park Service in 1964.
The stunning property, its artworks and gardens are reason enough for a road trip. (Who doesn’t need a studio with a giant north-facing, angled glass skylight; a vine-draped colonnade; and a marble fountain fed by gilded fish?) So is the opportunity for a more private experience of Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw and Marian Hooper Adams memorials, versions of which live in the quiet gardens surrounded by a tall cedar hedge. But in addition to preserving this history, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial has two programs that illuminate it through the eyes of living artists.
During open studio hours, guests can stop by the Ravine Studio — a tiny shack built around 1900 in the nearby woods — to visit the site’s sculptor-in-residence. The program, which began in 1969, is the oldest artist’s residency run by the national park system. This season, the resident is New Orleans artist Heidi Mortensen.
When Seven Days visited, she was carving a portrait bust out of super-smooth Laguna clay. Instead of memorializing a Gilded Age socialite or other historical figure, Mortensen said, the work is part of a series celebrating “people who are just really strong and interesting individuals but who probably would never have their portrait done in this way.” In reference photos, Miss Katrina Peters, a casually smiling, older Black Louisiana woman, comes across as affable and genuine. The sculpted image of her retains those qualities beneath the sense of gravitas inherent to the traditional form.
Earlier this month, Sarah Peters, the recipient of the 2025 Saint-Gaudens Fellowship, joined Mortensen on-site for an artist talk. While artists apply for the residency, fellowships are awarded by a nominating committee and include both a grant and a solo show. Exhibitions take place in the two-room Picture Gallery, which, according to Memorial executive director Jackie Rocha, was once Saint-Gaudens’ chicken coop.
Peters, 53, who lives in Queens, is known for stark figurative sculptures that appear at once futuristic and ancient. Often coated with a chromelike finish, they look like something out of the silent sci-fi film Metropolis. The three presented here are white plaster working models for those pieces.
“Augur” takes a helmet-like form, its smooth face balanced by a pyramid of wavy hair. “Charioteer 2” is more of a mask, with spooky, empty eyeholes almost like headlights. Behind them, the head bisects into two masses of hair that Peters said are inspired by chariot wheels. “Smile” has no facial features but references the place where two faces meet in a classical sculpture of Janus: a valley framed by the backs of two ears.
Peters draws on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Cypriot art for inspiration, as well as modernists such as Constantin Brâncuşi, but her processes aren’t so different from the way Saint-Gaudens made his work on the same site. (The large studio where his assistants cast sculptures burned down in the 1940s, and the outbuildings beside it became the Picture Gallery and a small museum of his work.) Though mold making and casting are now often done using computers and 3D printers, Peters said she values making the almost symmetrical, slightly imperfect plaster forms by hand.
“It’s very important to me that they are not correct, even though I try really hard to do it correctly,” she said.
I want to feel connected. I want to feel kinship.
Sarah Peters
Peters titled her exhibition “Sketchbook” in recognition of a sense of sculptural process that spans eras, including Saint-Gaudens’ own. “I asked if we could find the most chunky, messy maquettes that are in the collection,” she said; six such forms from Saint-Gaudens’ atelier are on view in a glass display case.
In the next room, Peters presents a series of 20 terra-cotta reliefs that she carved based on a collection of photos she’s taken of art in museums over decades. Saint-Gaudens was a master of relief, and the series is a beautiful echo of his works that hang just next door. Peters’ slabs evoke sketching: thinking, trying, changing one’s mind, erasing, building back up. She focuses on the stance of a classical statue, the gesture of a Renaissance hand, the crouched pose of an ancient lion, as though trying to remember each one.
Her sculptures remind us why it’s so important to contemplate such works, and historic sites such as this one. “When I see an artwork made by another artist,” Peters said, “I want to be their friend. I want to hold hands with them. I want to feel connected. I want to feel kinship.” How utterly grand! ➆
“Sarah Peters: Sketchbook,” on view through October 26 at the Saint-Gaudens Memorial in Cornish, N.H. Artist-in-residence open studio hours, Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m.-noon and 1-4 p.m., through October 31. $10; free for kids under 16.
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Grand Tradition | An artist-in-residence and a temporary exhibit present sculpture in a new light at Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park”
This article appears in August 26 • 2026.
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