The Dallas Arboretum's "Dallas Blooms" opens Saturday. The event is described as the largest floral festival in the Southwest, featuring 500,000 spring-blooming flowers, azaleas and hundreds of Japanese cherry trees.
Also this year, "Dallas Blooms: The Great Contributors" is expanding. The exhibit includes sculptures of influential people from American and world history.
"The sculpture exhibit just adds another element," says the Dallas Arboretum's Dave Forehand. "Art is beautiful in gardens, and having these here just helps you engage, so not only do you come and see the floral beauty, but you can come engage with these statues as well."
Gary Lee Price had previously produced sculptures of people including Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein. The sculptures are seated on benches and create scenes to encourage people to take pictures.
Price says the sculptures also include clothes specific to the person and items they would have carried in their lives.
"That's one of the things I have really enjoyed about doing the sculptures is research on every one of them," he says. "Before I sculpt them, I watch all the videos I can, read all I can."
This year, he has added several more sculptures, focusing on women who have influenced history.
The new sculptures include Mother Teresa, Amelia Earhart and Harriett Tubman.
"That's what it does is makes them real," Price says.
Of Tubman, he says, "You an look at how she dressed, why does she have a walking stick? She's got a pistol in her sash. Why?"
The arboretum's Forehand says pieces like that can spark a discussion among visitors about the person they are looking at.
"They look so real. He brings the actual spark of life to these sculptures," he says.
"You can sit next to them. I think that just makes it really fun, the idea that you can be right next to them and actually touch the sculptures, I think makes it great especially for kids."
Price says he designed the sculptures to be touched so the pieces would be more memorable and also to draw the interest of kids who could learn about the people and may develop an interest in art themselves.
"I got in trouble at the Rodin Museum in France when I told my kids sculptures are made to touch," he says. "You don't do that at a museum, right?"
Dallas Blooms: The Great Contributors runs through April 16 at the Dallas Arboretum. Details and tickets are available at: https://www.dallasarboretum.org/events-activities/dallas-blooms/.
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