For four years, the Atlanta Botanical Garden has built winter attendance with its unconventional holiday light show “Garden Lights, Holiday Nights.” Now the Midtown attraction is announcing that it will be aglow during warm weather, too, with the outdoor art exhibition “Bruce Munro: Light in the Garden,” running May 2 through Oct. 3.
Munro, a British artist famed for using light as an artistic medium, will create six site-specific installations, using hundreds of miles of optic fiber among other materials, scattered around the garden and its conservatories. Some will be set to music.
“Light” will illuminate the garden from 6 to 11 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, turning it into what garden president and CEO Mary Pat Matheson calls a “magical yet natural landscape that visitors just have to see to believe.”
The show’s largest installation, “Forest of Light,” will feature more than 30,000 flower-like light stems blanketing Storza Woods — a display that visitors can experience from the forest floor or from the Canopy Walk high above. It will be an adaptation of Munro’s “Field of Light,” first exhibited at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004.
Another installation, “Water Towers,” includes massive cylindrical sculptures made of thousands of lighted, water-filled one-liter recyclable bottles.
Munro, whose first U.S. exhibition was in 2012 at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., has created everything from architectural lighting schemes for private residences, hotels and restaurants to garden illuminations out of his southwest England studio since 1992.
“We have an enduring passion for light in all its forms and approach the creation of lighting plans for interiors and gardens as art in itself,” Munro said of his small design team. “But our large-scale installations are our heart and soul, and best express what we love about light.”
Tickets for this special event will be $22.95, $15.95 ages 3-12 on Fridays-Saturdays; $19.95, $13.95 children on Wednesdays-Thursdays and Sundays. Dinner will be available at the Café at Linton's in the garden, which will also feature cash bars and entertainment. Information: atlantabotanicalgarden.org.
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