Amy Sweetman with her small bluebirds last summer at Transformation Trails, the park in progress at the former Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. She’s looking for a new site to host the large-scale bluebird sculpture she envisions. (
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Sculptor Amy Sweetman, of Warwick, NY, is looking for a public space in Orange County to host a large-scale bluebird sculpture that will be the culmination of an ambitious community sculpture project.
“I know that there is a continued life for this. I need to figure out a way to help it along in a way that honors the project,” she said in March, on a front porch surrounded by bird feeders and wind chimes overlooking a dairy farm.
After two years of collaboration, Sweetman recently parted ways with the Town of Warwick on the joint project of Transformation Trails, a new 10-acre park at the former mid-Orange Correctional Facility that was featured in the fall 2024 issue of Dirt.
Sweetman had begun crowdfunding for Transformation Trails by designing and hand-painting 400 personal-sized metal bluebirds. She put half of each bluebird sale into a fund that would eventually pay for the large-scale bluebird sculpture she intended to create, to anchor the sculpture park she envisioned as part of the 10-acre site. The project has been so engrossing that it has earned her a new nickname with kids in her art classes: “the Bluebird Lady.”
So far, 51 of the personal bluebirds have sold – they’ve been given as bridal gifts, memorials and birthday presents. “They’re meant to be joyful. They’re meant to be shared,” she said of the bluebirds, many of which adorn her porch. “They’re transformative – even if it’s eight inches of your space, it’s something that catches the light when it turns.”
Each buyer’s name is documented on Sweetman’s Agrisculpture website, and will eventually be featured near the permanent bluebird sculpture, wherever it ends up, she said.
Now the crowdfunded bluebird won’t be located at Transformation Trails, but Sweetman is determined to find it a new home. She has been pondering locations. Perhaps somewhere in the City of Newburgh (her birthplace); or the Town of Cornwall (where she grew up); Thomas Bull Memorial Park; the Orange County Government Center, where the form of a massive bluebird would provide an organic, colorful counterpoint to the Brutalist concrete backdrop; or Stewart Airport, where she’d love to turn a decommissioned Cessna into a bluebird big enough for travelers to sit in and take selfies on their way through.
Typically, requests for proposals come from institutions looking for sculpture, she points out with a grin. She is putting out the reverse kind of RFP: for a large public space to host her sculpture.
“I’m looking for a place the bluebird would like to live. I know for a fact that the home is going to appear,” she said. “I don’t have a map. That’s what makes it exciting. That’s what makes it worthwhile. I don’t know what’s next, and that’s so awesome.”