The Spoon Is Probably the State's Most Photographed Object

The fountain at the foot of Lowry Hill was the first work commissioned for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, ordered in 1985 by then-Walker Art Center director Martin Friedman and installed in 1988. It was funded by a $500,000 gift from art collector Frederick R. Weisman. The spoon weighs 5,800 pounds and the cherry 1,199 pounds; the whole piece spans 52 feet and straddles a pond shaped like a linden seed, echoing the lindens in the surrounding garden.

Its power is its legibility. A spoon, a cherry, a pond, and you know exactly where you are, no wall text required. That clarity is why it photographs cleanly from nearly any angle and reads the same to a lifelong resident and a first-time visitor. By 2001, writer Eric Dregni was already calling it the unofficial symbol of Minneapolis.

There is a pleasing irony in a museum known for difficult work producing the region's most universally liked image. The Walker books demanding theater and challenging exhibitions, yet its most famous offshoot is a sculpture nearly everyone loves on sight. An institution able to make both the avant-garde and the crowd-pleaser understands that a culture needs each.

For the neighborhood, the fame is a fact of daily life. The garden reopened on June 10, 2017, after a two-year reconstruction that unified it with the Walker into a 19-acre campus, gave the Spoonbridge a fresh coat of paint, and kept the grounds free and open 365 days a year, run by the Walker in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. The wedding parties, tourists and influencers come for the photo. Residents of the hill can walk down on a quiet weekday morning and have one of the state's most photographed objects briefly to themselves.