The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum with 237 embellished concrete and mixed media sculptures built between 1948 and 1964 by Fred Smith, a retired lumberjack and self-taught artist and musician. Installed throughout Smith’s northwoods property in Phillips, WI, the site is a historical panorama of life-size and larger-than-life sculptures depicting people, animals, and events from local, regional and national history, from local lore, and from Smith’s expansive imagination.
The Wisconsin Concrete Park is a masterwork of 20th century vernacular art environments. Throughout the site Smith depicted history as an elastic entity in which local and national people, events, and histories are intermingled with animals, all sharing a common landscape.
Friends of Fred Smith mission: The Wisconsin Concrete Park is a Price County park. The Friends of Fred Smith, Inc. (FoFS) a non-profit organization, exists to support the Wisconsin Concrete Park in cooperation with Price County. The mission of FoFS is to preserve the Wisconsin Concrete Park and all its resources––including the sculptures, landscape, and the Historic Smith Family House––and to maintain and develop it as a public educational and cultural facility.
