Keeping a Sculptor’s Legacy Alive: Inside the Langlais Art Preserve

Nestled in the southern area of Georges River Land Trust sits the Langlais Art Preserve, a 90-acre space featuring Bernard Langlais’s stunning large-scale wooden sculptures. With his wife, Helen, Langlais lived on the land from 1966 to 1977, transforming the environment into a creative outdoor studio filled with dynamic sculptural installations.

Today, the preserve serves as an immersive community engagement center through which Mainers and tourists can combine environmental connection with artistic experiences. Led by director Hannah Blunt, it offers programming for visitors of all ages that celebrates Langlais’s legacy and nurtures participants’ sense of curiosity and creativity.

The Intersections of Art and Nature

The Langlais Art Preserve — a current Onion Foundation grantee — was gifted to the land trust through a partnership between Colby College and the Kohler Foundation, a Wisconsin-based organization that specializes in preserving artist-built environments.

“The Kohler Foundation takes ownership of a property and prepares it to be opened to the public,” explains Blunt. “Then, they pass permanent ownership to a long-term steward.” In 2017, the Georges River Land Trust became that steward for the Langlais Preserve. And Blunt has been with the preserve every step of the way.

As a former curator for Langlais’s art at Colby College, Blunt has both a deep well of knowledge about the artist’s work and a strong appreciation for it. “I joined the land trust in 2023 as the first dedicated staff person for the site,” Blunt says. “That’s enabled more fundraising, grant writing, and program planning so we can focus on exploring unique opportunities for education, community engagement, nature experiences, and building appreciation for Langlais’s creative legacy.”

In just a year of dedicated programming, Blunt and program assistant Caitlin Kelty-Huber have doubled visitorship to the site, with people coming from all across the state to participate in the preserve’s interactive programs.

Creative Nature Programs

In the past year, more than 380 people have participated in different Creative Nature Programs, designed to foster intergenerational learning, nature observation, and self-expression. These programs include:

Wonder Walks

Twice per week, caregivers bring their young ones — infants through kindergarteners — to the preserve to explore natural habitats and interact with Langlais’s sculptures. Kids can borrow backpacks with exploratory tools such as a sketch pad, a magnifying glass, a color wheel, and a spoon for digging.

“Caitlin [Kelty-Huber] is a Maine master gardener and deeply knowledgeable about the local ecology,” says Blunt. “She helps the kids observe the tiny details of bugs and plants.” The children can meander around the sculptures and explore the preserve’s rich lands.

Art Adventures

Designed for youth ages six and older, the Art Adventures program gives young people a chance to explore the preserve, go on guided nature walks, and then head back to the main center to participate in an art project based on what they experienced.

In the “Leaf Peeps” adventure, for example, youth observe fallen leaves and use art to highlight their vibrant colors. “Disturbance Detectives,” on the other hand, offers kids the opportunity to make creative maps based on the evidence of human action they pick up on their nature walks.

“Alix Martin, our educator, designed one lesson around Bernard Langlais specifically,” Blunt says. “Children made animal sculptures and told stories about their animals.”

Watershed Workshops

Watershed Workshops enable teens and adults to explore ecology through creative expression. “The program features a regional artist whose work explores environmental themes or nature-related inquiry,” says Blunt. “The artists talk about their work and then organize a workshop including nature observation.”

Rockland-based stonecarver Sam Finkelstein, for example, brought a group to the land trust’s rocky coastline. Participants observed the rocks, imagining what forms could emerge from them, then used quick-drying clay to bring their imaginative designs to life. These artistic adventures are highly popular: Every one of the preserve’s Watershed Workshops has been waitlisted.

Art Residencies

While the preserve is built around Langlais’s work, it also supports dynamic art from local makers through longer-term residencies. This year, artist and woodworker Gina Siepel created five installations throughout the preserve as part of her Forest Geometries project. With the help of a map-zine, visitors can explore how the sculptures celebrate the forest’s “ever-evolving negotiation of five life-giving elements — sunlight, soil, air, water, and space.”

Art for All

In addition to the set programs, there’s much to do at the Langlais Art Preserve. Visitors can walk the 2.3-mile loop to see Langlais’s beautiful sculptures. Kids can play in the outdoor Tinker Garden. And families can enjoy live performances and art activities at the ongoing Preserve Picnics.

Langlais artists also bring different communities into their workshops, particularly through the school-based Creative Nature Club. Students engage in a rigorous environmental education activity, then head back to the teaching studio for hands-on art-making. “It’s an amazing opportunity to learn about fundamental ecological processes and be playful and make creative work in response,” Blunt says.

A Gateway to the Land Trust

The Georges River Land Trust maintains more than 80 miles of nature trails and is home to 23 land preserves from Montville to Cushing. By offering a robust arts program, the Langlais Art Preserve has created a new point of entry for Mainers who’ve never experienced the land trust before. “It’s similar to building a trail so that people can experience nature and learn how to care about it,” says Blunt. “Art experiences do that, too. They’re another entry point to the land trust.”

Indeed, the preserve is cultivating a whole new audience for the land trust. Many fans of Langlais’s sculptures come from far and wide to explore his art and, in the process, experience more of what the land trust has to offer. As Blunt puts it, the arts program is a “rich, direct bridge to the land trust’s community engagement goals.”

Now, the land is seeing greater visitorship, program participation, and appreciation of the natural environment. “Art is the avenue for transformation, for seeing things anew, for making connections, for storytelling, for community building,” Blunt says. “That all happens here on the land trust.”

Preserving and Evolving

The first year of dedicated arts programming at the Langlais Art Preserve was a huge success. And now, Blunt and Kelty-Huber are in reflection mode. They’re considering what worked well and what didn’t, and how to hone their work even further for the year to come.

In 2026, the team is committed to offering the full slate of programs for all ages as well as hosting another artist in residence. In the years following, Blunt hopes to meet community requests for school and youth organization field trips to the preserve. “We’d like to have resources for teachers ahead of time that are tailored to the Maine state learning goals,” she says.

Additionally, the team is hoping to add another native plant pollinator garden in the future, with interactive artist-designed elements like stepping stumps. Blunt says, “We’d like it to become a space where play and education around nature plants could happen at once.”

Langlais’s sculptures teach us the power of turning static materials into living, breathing art. His pieces show creativity and movement and connection to the natural world. And, with Blunt at the helm of its programming, the preserve will undoubtedly continue to sustain these values for years to come.