On May 17, nestled between the Ashokan Reservoir and the eternal rumble of Route 28, a quiet marvel of Catskills eccentricity will throw open its gates for the inaugural Art-Nature-Music-Fest. From 3 to 7pm, Brunel Park in Boiceville will come alive with performances by Hudson Valley icons Sylvia Bullett, Matoaka Little Eagle, and Paul McMahon, and the elemental clangor of Ian Laughlin’s rain-and-wind-activated sculpture. It’s a celebration decades in the making—one part Woodstock magic, one part visionary outsider art, and one part historical resurrection.
Brunel Park is a 1.5-acre sculpture garden and former artist’s retreat built by Emile Brunel, a French immigrant who once commanded fame as a celebrity photographer. Born in 1869 in Châteauneuf-la-Forêt, Brunel made his way to New York by 1904, and by 1910 had founded the New York Institute of Photography. His clients included FDR, Sarah Bernhardt, and Enrico Caruso. But it was the American West—and particularly Native American cultures—that captured his imagination and altered the trajectory of his life.
In 1921, he purchased land in Boiceville and built Le Chalet Indien, a rustic lodge resort with a vaguely appropriative but earnest homage to Indigenous aesthetics. As tastes changed and vacationers wandered elsewhere, Brunel pivoted. Between 1929 and 1941, he sculpted a fantastical, deeply personal pantheon in concrete and steel: towering mythic figures, totems, and one monumental piece called The Great White Spirit, a tree-shaped crypt that houses his ashes. His statues, simultaneously reverent and surreal, channel Brunel’s belief in a shared spiritual thread across cultures—part Catholic mystic, part Western romantic, part cosmic hippie before such a thing existed.
After his death in 1944, the site fell into a long dormancy, the concrete gods slowly overtaken by moss, brush, and time. A roadside curiosity, if anything. But in recent years, a small group of stewards—descendants, artists, dreamers—have lovingly restored the park, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a nonprofit community arts hub and wildlife sanctuary.
Visitors to Brunel Park today will find a sculpture garden as strange and sacred as any roadside shrine, framed by native plantings and songbirds. The original studio—an Arts and Crafts fever dream of carved woodwork and symbolist flourishes—still stands. And while you can visit most weekends for a self-guided tour, the May 17 Art-Nature-Music-Fest is something else entirely: not just a festival, but a reanimation. Brunel’s sculptures—neither fully sacred nor wholly secular—seem to absorb the energy of whatever surrounds them. Song, wind, rain, memory. In a time that prefers the polished and the knowable, Brunel Park remains gloriously out of step: a shrine to mystery, made in concrete.
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This article appears in May 2025.
