Beverly Park's Sculpture Trail: Five New Pieces, One Permanent Addition, And The Loop Nobody Finishes

Walk to the south end of Beverly Park this month, past the sledding hill that everyone in the village can find with their eyes closed in January, and you will pass a piece of public art that has been sitting there since last year. Most people walk right by it. The hill gets attention six months out of twelve. The sculpture next to it gets none, which is strange, because it is not going anywhere. It is permanent. The five pieces around it are not, and that distinction is the whole story most residents are missing about their own park.

Beverly Hills runs a program called Sculptures in the Parks, and it has quietly built out a rotating outdoor collection inside a 34-acre neighborhood park that most people associate with sledding, disc golf, and the Halloween Hoot. The Village adds new work every year. Some of it stays a season. One piece, as of last year, stays for good.

What's Actually On View Right Now

The 2026 rotation brought five new sculptures into the park, each placed at a different point along the grounds:

None of these were here in 2025. None of them will still be here in 2027, at least not in the same spot, because the program is built to turn over. That is the part worth sitting with. If a title on that list catches your eye, this is the year to actually go look, because the piece has a shelf life in this location that a park bench or a picnic table does not.

The Village keeps a map of where each sculpture sits, available on the parks and recreation site, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Beverly Park is compact, but it is not so small that five scattered sculptures announce themselves. Without the map, you are relying on the same accident that got most residents to notice the first one: happening to walk past it.

The One That Isn't Leaving

In 2025, artist Dennis Cook donated a sculpture called Composition in Three Colors #1 to the Village, and unlike everything else in the rotation, it became a permanent fixture. It sits at the south end of the park, near the sledding hill, which means it is one of the most-passed pieces of art in the entire village and also one of the least-discussed. Every kid who has ever dragged a sled up that hill in January has walked within thirty feet of it. Ask most of their parents what it's called and you will get a blank look.

That contrast is the useful part. The rotating pieces reward showing up this year specifically. The permanent piece rewards actually stopping, once, ever, because it will be there the next time you bring a sled or a dog or a kid on a bike, unlike the five names in that table.

Three Years Of This, Not One

The 2026 lineup did not appear out of nowhere. The year before, the rotation included Catch of the Day by Doug DeLind, Geometric Construction on Table by Ray Katz, Dragon Queen by Sunday Mahaja, and Magnify by Kirk Seese. The year before that, 2024, brought How Gravity Works by John Bannon, Relic by Dennis Cook, Helicopter Seeds by Brian Ferriby, In Remembrance of Lightning Bugs by Craig Hinshaw, and Strange Roots by Michael Magnotta.

That is three consecutive years of new outdoor work moving through a park better known for its sledding hill and its ice rink. Ray Katz and Kirk Seese have each had two different pieces installed in two different years, which suggests the Village has working relationships with specific artists rather than a one-time grant that funded a single rotation and then quietly stopped. Dennis Cook shows up twice as well, first with a rotating piece called Relic in 2024, then with the donation that became permanent in 2025. A program with repeat contributors and a track record like that is closer to an actual institution than a seasonal decoration, even if it lives inside a 34-acre park most people know for entirely different reasons.

Finishing The Loop

The sculptures sit inside a park that already asks more of a short visit than most people give it. Beverly Park has a nine-hole disc golf course that is free to play, rated easy, and runs about an hour and roughly a mile if you play it straight through. There is a Storybook Trail through the grounds as well, the kind of paved, low-effort walk that works for a stroller or a kid on a first bike as easily as it works for an adult killing twenty minutes before dinner. From the park itself, Douglas Evans Nature Preserve is about a two-minute drive up Evergreen Road, an 18-acre parcel deed-restricted to stay in its natural state, open for walking and nature study but not built out with trails or signage the way the main park is.

If you keep going instead of turning back at the sledding hill, Riverside Park sits on Riverside Drive east of Evergreen Road, a half-acre spot with a picnic table and grill that backs up to a mill pond fed by the Rouge River. It is small enough that most people who have lived in the village for years have never had a reason to stop there, which is exactly the point. On the other side of the village, off 14 Mile Road, Hidden Rivers Nature Preserve sits on a peninsula formed by branches of the Rouge, bordering a private golf course on its northern edge, left alone enough that the Village describes it as virtually undisturbed by people.

There is a newer addition to this list too. In September 2025, the Village finalized the acquisition of a parcel along the Rouge River on Wendbrook Lane, using a state natural resources grant along with a matching donation from local residents, the White family, who bought the property specifically to see it preserved. The Village Council formally recognized it as Wendbrook Park, folding it into the existing park system, though a master plan for what actually gets built there is still in progress. For now it is the quietest of the village's green spaces, mostly because almost nobody knows it exists yet.

Put together, that is a nine-hole disc golf course, a paved storybook trail, a rotating outdoor sculpture collection with a three-year track record, two deed-restricted nature preserves, a mill pond park most residents have never visited, and a brand new addition to the system still waiting on its first improvements. None of it requires a car beyond the two-minute drive to Douglas Evans, and almost none of it shows up when people describe what Beverly Hills is like day to day. The village has next to no commercial zoning and very little industrial land, which means most of its character gets built inside its parks rather than its main street. It turns out that character now includes an actual, changing art collection, and most of the people walking past it every week could not tell you a single title on the current list.

If you already know this village well enough to have opinions about the sledding hill, you now know something about it that most of your neighbors don't. That is usually where the more interesting conversations about a place start, whether the topic is a sculpture or the value of the house two doors down.

If you ever want to talk through what a specific property in Beverly Hills is actually worth in this market, or you're just curious how homes near the park have been trading, Residential Rome is a good place to start that conversation. Request Your Home Valuation whenever you're ready.