Yayoi Kusama is an artist who works in painting, poetry, and performance art, but her most famous work is a series of sculptures of colorful pumpkins. Kusama began drawing pumpkins as a child, and in 1994, she created an eight-foot-wide yellow pumpkin with black spots that was displayed on a pier at Naoshima Island. After being destroyed in a typhoon, the original pumpkin was recreated and re-installed in 2022.

“Angry Boy” is a sculpture created by Gustav Vigeland that now appears to have one particularly shiny hand. That’s because visitors have traditionally rubbed it for luck, and the bronze has faded over time. For what it’s worth, the museum says in its “FAQ” section that they consider it good luck to avoid touching the hand.

Overlooking Famagusta Bay in Cyprus, Ayia Napa Sculpture Park has an international focus, featuring artists from more than 50 different countries. In 2015, a year after the sculpture park was established, a section called the Ayia Napa Cactus Park was opened, which features cacti donated from local residents.

Leo Fitzmaurice is a British artist and winner of the Northern Art Prize. Fitzmaurice was inspired to create his “Litter” display when he mistakenly thought he saw a field full of white rabbits when he was actually looking at a bunch of small plastic bags whose handles appeared to be ears. Fitzmaurice used bronze to create a series of rabbit-like shapes, scattered near a stone wall in Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Sculptor Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist whose work frequently explores Buddhist philosophy. One of his most well-known pieces, “Three Legged Buddha,” is found at New York’s Storm King Art Center. The copper and steel sculpture is 28 feet tall and weighs over 12 tons. One of the Buddha’s three legs stands atop a human head in the ground that is eight feet tall on its own.

Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1988, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center is one of the country’s largest urban sculpture gardens. The 19-acre park’s most famous sculpture is "Spoonbridge and Cherry,” which depicts a giant spoon topped with a cherry, built in 1985 by artist Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen.

Located near St. Louis, Missouri, Laumeier Sculpture Park spreads across 105 acres and features over 60 works of art, the most notable of which might be Tony Tasset’s “Eye.” The huge, realistic-looking eyeball sits in the field, with its blue iris staring out from in between trees. The eye is made of fiberglass and resin, and it measures over 37 feet in circumference.

Capalbio, Italy’s Tarot Garden is the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, a French-American artist and author. Saint Phalle was locked in an asylum when she was 22, and when she emerged she committed her life to art, which she believed brought her back to sanity. One of her first projects was to create a sculpture garden with 22 different figures, each representing a character from the tarot deck.

Adjacent to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park, the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden was built in 2003. The garden doubled in size in 2019 with three new works commissioned for the site: a 60-foot mosaic wall from Teresita Fernández, a Maya Lin installation inside the Sculpture Pavilion, and an all-glass bridge designed by Elyn Zimmerman.

On the waterfront in Queens, New York, Socrates Sculpture Park was built on top of a former landfill and illegal dumpsite. Artist Mark di Suvero organized an alliance of artists and community leaders to open the space in 1986, and the outdoor museum has featured work from over 1,000 artists across its five acres.

The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park displays over 200 works across 158 acres in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sculptors represented in the park include Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Moore, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. Degas was an impressionist who was frequently inspired by ballet, and Meijer Gardens displays one of his sculptures titled “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot.”

In Oslo, Norway, Ekebergparken spans across 25 wooded acres that contain over 40 species of birds, with wild animals and rare plants scattered among works from some of the world’s most famous sculptors. Salvador Dalí created the surreal, bronze Venus de Milo on the grounds. Titled “Venus de Milo aux tiroirs,” it features drawers protruding from the body.

When it opened in 1969, the Hakone Open Air Museum was the first of its kind in Japan. The park features more than 1,000 sculptures, including pieces from Calder, Picasso, and Rodin, among others. One of its most popular works, created by French artist Gabriel Loire, is “Symphonic Sculpture” — a lookout tower constructed entirely of stained glass standing 60 feet tall.

In Sonoma, California, the Donum Estate is both an award-winning winery that produces chardonnay and pinot noir, and also a sculpture park featuring over 40 large-scale pieces. Ai Weiwei, Keith Haring, and Zhan Wang are among the sculptors featured at Donum Estate, which began showcasing artwork in 2015.

Designed by sculptor and photographer Jason deCaires Taylor in 2006, Grenada’s Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park is the world’s first underwater sculpture park. The 8,000-square-foot park boasts more than 75 works made from pH-neutral cement that are bolted to the ocean floor. Since then, other underwater sculpture parks have also opened, including Subacuático de Arte in Mexico and Museo Atlantico in Lanzarote, Spain.

In Otterlo, the Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller museum displays a collection of over 160 sculptures — including works from Marta Pan, Aristide Maillol and Pierre Huyghe. It is perhaps most notable for its collection of about 90 paintings and over 180 drawings from Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. It is the second-largest collection of the artist’s works behind the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park covers 500 acres in West Yorkshire, England, making it the largest of its kind within Europe. Since its founding in 1977, the park has welcomed around 400,000 yearly visitors. The park also features six indoor galleries that display a rotating group of temporary exhibits from modern artists.

Covering over 500 acres of land, Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, is named for nearby Storm King Mountain. A popular day trip from New York City, the sculpture park contains over 100 works of art. One of the park’s highlights is an interactive exhibit by Isamo Naguchi called “Momo Taro,” which invites visitors to sing inside a granite sculpture to hear an unusual echo.

Covering nine acres and one of the largest green spaces in Seattle, the Olympic Sculpture Park is located a mile north of the Seattle Art Museum. The park is free to access, and even includes a beach on Puget Sound. The park’s design won an award in the nature category at the World Architecture Festival in 2008.

Norwegian scultpor Gustav Vigeland is best known for designing the Nobel Peace Prize medal. The Vigeland Museum, a free open-air museum in Oslo, Norway, is the world’s largest sculpture park dedicated to the work of a single artist. It features over 200 works in granite, bronze, and wrought iron, all completed by Vigeland.