Nelson-Atkins Shuttlecocks

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen built a career out of the monumental everyday, giant clothespins, spoons, typewriter erasers, and trowels placed in city plazas around the world. For Kansas City they seized on the museum's grand building and its wide lawns and imagined the whole ensemble as a badminton court, the stately Nelson-Atkins standing in for the net and the birdies frozen mid-game across the grass.

Each shuttlecock stands close to eighteen feet tall and weighs several thousand pounds, built of aluminum and fiberglass-reinforced plastic. There are four of them, arranged so that from certain angles the lawn really does read as a court in play. When they arrived in 1994 some locals were baffled or annoyed, but the birdies quickly won the city over, and today they are as much a symbol of Kansas City as any building.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opened in 1933, endowed largely by the newspaper publisher William Rockhill Nelson and by a Kansas City schoolteacher named Mary Atkins, whose separate bequests were combined to build it. It rose during the Great Depression, and its grand Beaux-Arts building became a cultural anchor for the city.

Inside is one of the country's finest art collections, especially strong in Asian art, European painting, and American works, along with a celebrated modern wing. The lawn and its birdies make the museum feel open and unpretentious, a place where families picnic and children roll down the grass beneath the great white cones.

Part of what makes the Shuttlecocks special is how accessible they are. They sit on open, welcoming lawn, so you do not need a ticket to enjoy them; the grounds and the Kansas City Sculpture Park around them are open to all, day and night. Families spread blankets between the birdies, and the pieces are lit after dark.

The surrounding Kansas City Sculpture Park holds other works as well, including bronzes by Henry Moore, so a walk across the grounds is a small outdoor gallery in itself. The Shuttlecocks anchor it with humor, a reminder that great art can also make you smile.

The museum stands in Kansas City's cultural district, a green, walkable neighborhood of institutions and stately homes. Just across the way is the Kansas City Art Institute, one of the country's respected art and design schools, whose students have long treated the museum grounds as a backyard.

A short drive south lies the Country Club Plaza, an early-twentieth-century shopping district built in Spanish Revival style, full of fountains and tilework and famous for its holiday lights. Between the Plaza, the museum, and the sculpture lawn, this corner of the city is one of its most rewarding to explore on foot.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.