Horse (Langlais Art Preserve)

A wooden horse beside River Road in Cushing, 13 feet tall according to Down East in 1972, signals the Langlais Art Preserve to passing drivers, and it has stood there since the 1960s. The preserve dates it to 1966, the year Langlais acquired a farm on the Cushing peninsula after leaving a successful art career in New York. A Down East article from June 1972, republished in 2024, said it was the first work to catch the "incredulous eyes of passers-by" and that, seen close up, it was hobbled firmly in a cement base. Langlais worked mostly in Maine pine and spruce. "Who’s to say the sculptures aren’t as native to Maine as I am?" he asked. Over the following decade he filled the property with outsized animals and the occasional human figure.

Langlais died in 1977, aged 56. After his wife, Helen, died in 2010 the property passed to the Colby College Museum of Art, which worked with the Kohler Foundation to preserve it, and the Georges River Land Trust took ownership. The Press Herald reported in 2017 that the horse was restored as part of the five-year project, that the preserve cost about $2.5 million to restore, and that it opened with a dozen large sculptures along a walking trail. Down East gave the farm as 80 acres in 1972; the preserve describes a 90-acre site today.