The giant frog sculpture is in trouble. As artist Malcom White, 66, maneuvers it carefully off of a trailer, the twined wild grape vines crack and groan. Its eyes, made out of the rusty headlights of a long-abandoned Dodge, tilt up toward the summer sky.
The frog’s new owners, Northampton residents Meredith Gould, 72, and Charles Swenson, 76, watch protectively as the installation settles into place. It’s the first time they’ve ever purchased an original sculpture.
“I’ve been looking at it for years,” Gould said. “It’s cute, don’t you think?”
White, a quiet and slender man with an ear full of gold hoops, is busy carefully inching the frog into its new location, but he pauses to look up with a grin. Creating joy and whimsy is what his art is all about.
Since he moved to this Kennedy Road neighborhood in 2019, White — self-taught natural materials artist — has been creating a startling world of fantastic and oversized creatures, which have been gradually populating yards along the rural streets of Northampton. They emerge from what he gathers locally: wild grapevine, saplings and salvaged auto parts. Each creation is hand-fashioned. No two are alike.
White welcomes visitors to pause at his front-yard installations, to pull into the driveway if they like, and chat. Due to the amount of interest, he temporarily also installed a small flyer box with his biographical info, although he prefers one-on-one interactions. In late August, three of his pieces also went on display in Easthampton at the Park Hill Orchard’s ”Art in the Orchard” walking sculpture trail. The stick and vine hippopotamus, giraffe and baby elephant will be on display there until Thanksgiving weekend.
For White, the art is the combination of a family sculptural legacy — he is the grandson of noted South Shore sculptor Richardson White, whose bronze horses grace the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston — and a process uniquely his own. From the first vine creation, a charging rhino, White has produced a fantastic and ever-changing front yard zoo. Drive past his house and you might find an oversized bee swinging from the trees, a galloping horse covered in twinkle lights or a sea serpent surging out of the ground.
White doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t advertise. But the draw of his art is unmistakable. Cars stop. Neighbors stroll by regularly to see what’s new. Visitors leave notes about commissions. White once found a letter in his mailbox addressed to “The Stick Man,” requesting a bear for Mother’s Day, which he later created.
As he’s become more comfortable with the format, White has also been exploring the avant-garde: an oversized outstretched hand, first filled with rocks and now waving at cars; a headless torso furiously peddling a metal bike frame; and a carved thumbs-up marking his driveway.
To talk about his art, White, dressed casually in jeans and a white T-shirt, picks a wingback chair in his front living room. There, he can keep an eye on what he’s named Ebony Wings Farm, but what neighbors have dubbed “The Gallery.” When a visitor or a neighbor stops, White says, “There’s a gawker,” and occasionally pops out in his socks to chat. If there’s a child or a dog, he sits companionably beside them as he answers questions.
The son of two college professors, White grew up steeped in academia. He holds two degrees in political science, one from Michigan State University and one from Columbia University. In his 20s, White headed to the family residence in Cohasset to spend nine months living with his famous sculptor grandfather at Holly Hill Farm — a portion of which would later become an organic farm and educational nonprofit.
White recalls days spent baling hay and then watching his grandfather turn rough forms to precise, perfectly smooth bronze statues. He remembers his grandfather as a “kindly curmudgeon” and a powerful artistic presence — one who disdained abstraction of any kind.
“He could make a sculpture of a horse in 10 minutes that looked just beautiful. That just screamed ‘horse.’ I loved that,” White said. “And then he would proceed to perfect all the life out of it.”
White pursued a career as a reference librarian at Harvard University (he would later receive a degree in library science at Simmons University), but he couldn’t resist populating his basement office with tiny kinetic contraptions. The little whirligigs and geegaws were formed out of paper clips and Post-It notes and powered by a small fan.
“I had these crazy little things hanging all over the place,” White said. “So that was my art.”
He was also drawn to woodworking, taking joinery classes at North Bennet Street School in Boston, while he “dreamed of making beautiful furniture.” On weekends, he’d retreat to Holly Hill, where he used an old barn as an occasional workshop.
When the pull of wood became too powerful, White seized an opportunity to make an abrupt career shift from librarian to shop teacher at Dearborn Academy in Newton. There, working with elementary and middle school students with learning disabilities, he focused on small projects — a wind-up toy, a bench and a CD stand — that conveyed the joy in the art of making.
Two life changes gave White the push to evolve again: a divorce and a move to a rural neighborhood in Northampton. To find more creative inspiration and community connection, White drew on his past experiences of working at his grandfather’s farm, building rustic furniture and creating with his former students. As he dove into large-scale sculptures, White developed a style he called “minimally processed art,” where the goal was to find — and creatively build around — natural forms and found materials. In his world, the bole of wood was the eye of a running horse. A rusting piece of metal was an elephant ear.
“The best thing with projects I make is when they’ve got some defining feature that you can see,” he said. “So it doesn’t have to be super accurate or intricate to be able to tell what it is.”
In an age of 3D printing and digital design, White’s sculptures also feel radical in their rawness. They have flaws. They wear the marks of weather. They aren’t perfect.
“That’s what I love,” he said. “You see the hand in them.”
As his recent vine creations emerged, they have spread locally. In his next-door neighbor’s yard, a baby elephant steps lightly under the tree. Down the road, an oversized fiddle advertises private music lessons. A giant crow (the owners call it a raven), was one of his first commissioned pieces and now presides over an open meadow.
For the annual Art in the Orchard, an annual sculpture trail at Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton, White recently loaned out his trio of animals: A hippopotamus that yawns from the ground, a giraffe that browses a pear tree, and baby elephant in mid-trumpet.
Orchard owners Alane Hartley and Russell Braen said that the animal sculptures fit in well with the natural animal theme that has emerged this year.
“His work is like a safari,” Hartley said. “They migrated to the right place.”
Pleased with the way his work has been received, White has been reflexively generous. When a woman battling cancer stopped to say how much comfort his creatures gave her during her recent treatment. White gifted her a reindeer on the spot.
“I just couldn’t believe that someone would come here to find some respite,” he said, recalling the moment. “That was certainly the most powerful thing.”
Back on Kennedy Road, Gould, White’s newest customer, holds her breath as the car-sized frog settles into place in her yard. She said she’s delighted at the idea that this sculpture, and its enigmatic smile, will now help welcome clients to her home therapy office. The pull of the artwork was one she couldn’t resist, she said.
“Every time we passed that frog, I just felt like it belonged with me,” she said.
