Nek Chand
(1924–2015)
Nestled on the outskirts of the Indian city of Chandigarh is Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, a magical environment that testifies to its maker’s life philosophy as a follower of Gandhi, his spiritual inclinations as a Hindu, and his approaches to recycling, the landscape, and environmental preservation. Discovered in the 1970s by local government officials, Rock Garden was at risk of destruction, but because of public support the politicians and leaders of the region finally embraced it. Today, Rock Garden is more than twenty-five acres in size and contains more than two thousand works of art. It is now the second-most visited tourist site in India; only the Taj Mahal attracts more people. In the mid-1980s, Chand was invited to build a "Fantasy Garden" for the National Children’s Museum, in Washington, D.C. The result was the creation of approximately one hundred sculptures representative of the much larger project in India. When the National Children’s Museum vacated its property in 2004, the American Folk Art Museum received twenty-nine of these artworks, creating a perpetual link in New York to Nek Chand’s remarkable art environment in Asia.
Adapted from Brooke Davis Anderson, Juliana Driever, and Lee Kogan, exhibition text for Concrete Kingdom: Sculptures by Nek Chand. Brooke Davis Anderson, Juliana Driever, and Lee Kogan, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2006.