Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. The Gardens, which opened in Philadelphia in September 2025, say that “the objects on view respond to architectural moments rather than art historical narratives.” It is not a gallery presented with an eye toward education, but a space built to contain the work and amplify it.
In other words, it is a vibe. The building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, twists and turns in surprising ways. Outside, massive sculptures sit gracefully in pockets of the building. Inside, the ceiling is low in places to compress a work that towers in the middle. The balcony from the second floor looks out at eye level to the Alexander Calder mobiles hung from the ceiling. Down the stairs, you can look up at them from underneath as they rotate.
On the lower floor, a few of these “architectural moments” take the shape of notches in the walls, rounded and concave like the inside of an egg. It is only after wandering amongst the mobiles, your neck bent back so that your eyes can gaze up, that you might notice these little spaces, just deep enough to tuck yourself into. They are places to perch—not quite benches, but sills. The architects have built these spaces as if they are suction cup platforms stuck to a window, and we are their beloved, uninterested housecat who must be encouraged to observe the world outside ourselves.
My favorite of these intentional cavities is tucked away on the first floor in a narrow gallery only big enough for one piece, which is surrounded by curved smooth walls and a domed ceiling. It is an apse meant to worship a singular piece of art, an altar to Scarlet Digitals, one of Calder’s mobiles from 1945. And from inside the little nook, I can sit and stare at her for hours if I want.
Scarlet Digitals is a smidge over seven feet high, a breath under eight feet wide, and three-and-a-half feet deep, according to the collection guide. That measurement is not to be believed. A Calder mobile does not sit still in space to be measured. It flounces. It swirls. It refuses containment by mundane ideas such as lengths and heights. What matters is that it is life-sized, bigger than you. Scarlet Digitals looms, floating in the apse. The shadow on the wall curving beneath it, long and thin, is the shadow of a wildflower—gentle, waving in the breeze. Within the one, twisting, singular mobile exist four smaller sections: two black and two red-orange. The bottom two sections and the top are held by black wire but linked in the center by a slender, almost invisible red-orange wire so that the middle of the mobile almost disappears in space as it turns.
Scarlet Digitals has very little mass—just a few larger pieces at the bottom, and scattered nothings above. It is but a few shapes suspended in the air, spinning around at a snail’s pace. At the bottom of the piece, a black lily atop a pad is circled by a wispy triangle of a bee. Next to it, an orange radish with long leaves bursts, and above that is an orange chicken foot. Then, finally, at the top sits something more recognizable as a Calder: a multi-piece mobile, amorphous as a cloud.
Or maybe that’s not at all what it is. Maybe what is at the bottom is a cup atop a saucer wobbling unsteadily, a pitcher of cream nearby, while above it a bright shuttlecock tilts ominously toward it. Above that is an arrow … no … a crown … all beneath a hovering swarm of bees. Or it could all be more ominous than that: a man with hair brushed back from the wind of falling bombs, an explosion in the distance, an enemy far out on the horizon.
Like all of Calder’s work in mobiles, you engage with Scarlet Digitals both physically and intellectually. My movement, in the small nook next to Scarlet Digitals that one afternoon causes the mobile to begin to twist counterclockwise. The flap of a program used as a fan reflects in the radish twisting faster than the rest of the mobile for long after the flapping stopped. The sneeze of a child might brush the whole thing back a centimeter, if you only look.
Like many other artists born around the turn of the 20th century, Alexander Calder ventured toward abstraction to try and make meaning of the increasingly mechanical and violent world around him. Like his peer Piet Mondrian (who is coined a Neo-Plasticist), Calder did not easily fit into any of the popular artistic movements of his youth. He existed on his own, building twisting, oscillating mobiles for more than 40 years of his career. In a poem written by Calder for the Abstraction-Création group magazine in 1932, he wrote, “It must not be just a fleeting ‘moment’ but a physical bond between the varying events in life. / Not extractions / But abstractions.”
Abstraction requires a kind of childlike wonder—an open heart and mind to see more than just shapes on a string spinning in front of you. To ask yourself what you see in the mobiles is to reach for something past mere observation. What Calder understood about the world, and what his art continues to convey, is that the art only exists because of us. What makes an abstract work interesting and compelling is where it takes you emotionally or mentally when you look at it, and the work of an artist is to attempt to shepherd you toward one of those feelings.
For me, when I watch a Calder, I often feel overcome by a deep tranquility. To engage with a Calder is an act of near-hypnosis. Without manipulation, his mobiles move so slowly it is almost imperceptible. Because of this, the little wall nooks in Calder Gardens are an inspired choice. You can give your full attention to a work, let it anesthetize you to the greater world, so that all that exists over time is you and the strange, pirouetting shapes in front of you. In the hours of my life spent with Calders, I have found the same tranquility that exists for me otherwise only in the stillness of nature. It is not awe, exactly, but the mundane enchantment of attention.
I have always been drawn to Calder’s works (both the moving and the unmoving, which he coined “stabiles”). When the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art opened while I lived in D.C., I spent half an hour gazing at the gigantic kinetic sculpture hanging in the main atrium before a museum guide directed me up into a tower where dozens of tiny Calders resided. Many of the Calders in that tower are small mobiles and stabiles made for Calder’s friends for birthdays. There are a few swirling overhead mobiles, including one that looks like a fish. I used to go and visit that tower whenever I needed a burst of inspiration, to look at the tiny things he’d made in his free time that now stood in this place of honor. So I was thrilled when Calder Gardens opened last September.
All of Calder’s work feels vertiginous. The bright emphatic mobiles spin slowly enough that it’s easy to convince yourself that you are the one spinning. But Scarlet Digitals is hung to amplify that feeling even more. The floor underneath it curves upward into the wall behind it. There are no corners, no shadows except for those cast by the mobile. It feels as if you are falling into the mobile even if you sit carefully in the nook, your hand braced against the curved side walls.
Unlike many other mobiles in the museum, you cannot walk under or around Scarlet Digitals because of its positioning within the apse. Your eyes hit at its middle, as if it is a friend who you cannot understand in totality without patience. The middle piece, with its lighter color, connects and draws the viewer in. It spins so indolently, with such ease that it would be easy to glance at it for just a moment and move on. But if you stay, sit, and commune with Scarlet Digitals, it can feel as if the mobile itself is alive.
It isn’t, of course; it is just a mobile spinning ever so slowly in an apse. But we are, fully and terribly, alive.