Houston sculptor David Adickes, who was inspired to create the giant busts after driving past Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
The same way the proportions of Rushmore are all true and correct, his are all just slightly off, careening into the uncanny valley. They look like the result you’d get if the artist had only had Disney’s animatronic Hall of Presidents as his source material.
Is this President William Shatner or President John Roberts? I can’t tell.
This one is easy. Everyone recognizes President Len Cariou.
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Or is it President American Imperialist Bastard?
For being only 10 years old those busts are crumbling at an alarming rate. Were they damaged in transport or were they made of especially poor concrete?
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First imagery that came to my head
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Thanks! I didn’t know about this one, and it’s located very close to where I live. Might take a look some day 
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I, too, came here to object to “stone”. If they were machined from even the crappiest limestone (let alone granite), they could shrug off being left in a field for a generation or two. And that’s not extremely hard to do with modern technology. Even properly-made concrete heads ought to be good for a few decades of neglect. These appear to be from the mini golf tier of art fabrication. [taps ash from cigarette holder snootily]
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The part of that summary that jumps out at me is “mushroom magnate”
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Given that each head cost somewhere in the ballpark of $150,000-$200,000 depending on the other park expenses (the crappy land couldn’t have been that expensive, but there are other costs with getting a business up and running) they really didn’t seem to get their money’s worth. Even assuming each head had to be cast from a custom built mold designed and constructed by an artist that’s a fairly generous budget. Certainly some of that could have gone towards properly sealing the concrete to avoid water intrusion?
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Why would you pay to have ancient, stony figures look upon you with disappointment? I can get that for free at Thanksgiving.
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Mostly damaged in transport. From the Smithsonian article:
And so began the laborious process of moving 43 giant presidents, each weighing in between 11,000 and 20,000 pounds, to a field ten miles away. Hankins estimates the weeklong process cost about $50,000—not including the damage done to each sculpture during the move.
Any hopes of preserving the presidents in their original state were literally crushed as the busts made their journey from park to field. Each bust had to be lifted from its base by a crane, cracking the sculpture’s neck to get the full piece off the ground. The crane attached to a steel frame inside the busts through a hole smashed into the top of each sculpture’s head. Then, each president was loaded onto a flatbed truck and hauled away to Hankins’ property.
Cracked skulls were just the beginning: The team improvised as they went along, and the earlier busts moved bore the brunt of the movers’ initial inexperience. The first few moved have broken noses, missing backsides and other structural issues. Abraham Lincoln’s bust now has an eerie hole in the back of its head that brings to mind his tragic end, and Ronald Reagan’s bust bears the scar of a lightning strike. They all now sit decaying in three neat lines on the farm (except for George Washington, who stands to the side overlooking the group), where they continue to crumble, peel and crack.
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Imagine, if you will, a troubled republic represented by a field filled with crumbling Presidential stone heads.
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That is fekking RICH!
Divine disapproval destroys dickhead dummy’s dome
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Ahhh, so these are the “heads of state” that I hear so much about.
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Apparently they’re 5 - 7m tall, so if I was working on these I’d expect the cost to the client to be in the low five-figure range. But that would be to do it properly, e.g. casting them in reinforced modules (which would implicitly include lifting eyes for handling with a crane).
From the difficulty moving them, it sounds like they were made in place. I almost wonder if the concrete was worked plastically on a chicken-wire armature, like a sixties thin-shell building. I’m not familiar with sculpture being done like that (and it sounds like a bad idea unless they were very cheap), but I suppose it would be possible with the right additives. That might explain the spalling, too. It makes me think these wouldn’t be in much better condition if the park were still open today.
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I don’t recognize the reference, could you clue me in?
Which is worse, a panoply of decayed presidents’ heads, or the Desert Christ Park in Yucca Valley CA with decaying biblical effigies, or a rotted Ark park?
