Great meadows

Outside Louisville, Kentucky, lies Great Meadows, the home of Episcopal priest and contemporary art collector Al Shands. Completed in 1988, the home that he and his late wife Mary built was designed by architect David Morton and tailored to be as outstanding an artifact as each of the works it houses. The collection, accumulated over a period of thirty-five years, encompasses major handicrafts and ceramic objects and has grown to focus on large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissioned work by Petah Coyne, Sol LeWitt, Maya Lin, Stephen Vitiello, and Betty Woodman. The volume explores the complex subtlety of Morton’s building, the beauty of the surrounding landscape, as well as the numerous unconventional surprises and tangents within the collection, which testify to the Shands’s expertise and unerring intuition.