Gardens As Art: Aesthetic Journeys around the World,Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Giardino dei Tarocchi”

Betsy Tumasonis will lecture on Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Giardino dei Tarocchi”: A French Artist and her Italian Sculpture Garden. Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 – 2002) was a French artist and sculptor who associated in the early 1960s with the French Nouveaux Realistes group. She experimented with assemblages made of bizarre collections of objects, evoking a Dadaist sense of the absurd. In 1980 she began work on her “Giardino dei Tarocchi” (Tarot Garden) in Tuscany. She filled the park-like property with enormous colourful otherworldly figures based on images from the Tarot deck (fortune-telling cards). A stroll through the garden is a magical experience.