Vivid Creatures

An exhibition of colorful, large-scale sculptures is opening soon at The Morton Arboretum.

Vivid Creatures: An encounter with colorful forest friends, a new outdoor art exhibition at The Morton Arboretum, is an invitation to explore our connections with the natural world through giant, colorful, playful animal sculptures placed outdoors amid towering trees and sweeping green vistas. Each artwork tells a story about the interconnected relationships between creatures and the ecosystems where they live.

Guests of all ages can delight in an oversized white-tailed deer, brittle button snail, fox squirrel, dragonfly, and sandhill crane—all animals that either migrate through or are part of the Illinois region—depicted in larger-than-life artworks up to 24 feet tall.

The sculptures will be placed among the tree collections and natural areas of The Morton Arboretum, the Chicago area’s largest public garden, where many of these creatures live.

The five steel-and-concrete sculptures were created exclusively for The Morton Arboretum by Fez and Heather BeGaetz of Portland, Oregon.

Exhibition Details

Vivid Creatures will open on Saturday, May 17, 2025.

The exhibition will be included with admission to the Arboretum.

Four of the five sculptures will be within walking distance of the Arboretum’s central Visitor Center. For those who would enjoy a longer walk or drive, one sculpture will be placed on the berm that separates the Arboretum from Interstate Highway 88.

About the Artists

Working together as partners in life and art, Fez and Heather BeGaetz love to make works that people can experience from afar, up close, underneath, on top, or inside. Vivid Creatures is their largest exhibition to date.

Presenting Sponsor:

Heather and Fez BeGaetz are partners in life and art. The duo creates large-scale sculptures and environments that have been exhibited internationally at numerous immersive art destinations, art and music festivals, conferences, and urban spaces. They live and work near the shores of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, on the unceded lands of Chinook and Kalapuya people. Their creative collaboration is mused by their daughter Calliope.

Together, Fez and Heather love to make works that people can experience from afar, up close, underneath, on top, or inside.

Notable exhibition credits include Area 15, an immersive art destination in both Las Vegas and Riyadh; the Electric Forest music festival in Michigan; the Burning Man art and music festival in Nevada; The Orion Amphitheater in Alabama; and the Toronto Light Festival.

In her sculptural works, Heather BeGaetz creates enormous art beings as invitations to take sanctuary in wonder. Her pieces become gathering places for people to enter worlds of imagination. Her creative roots in the performing arts as a theatrical writer, director, performer, and mask-maker inform her large-scale sculptures and immersive art environments. Understanding life as a complex artful interaction, she makes large-scale sculptures to provoke a sense of creative possibility and participation.

Fez BeGaetz integrates a lifetime of building skills with explorations at the edge of his imagination into fantastical large-scale art. He is skilled at designing for modularity at scale while bringing maverick creative agility to engineering, fabrication, and installation challenges. Honed by over a decade of experience as an Antarctica expedition guide, his creative intelligence is shaped by the artful forces of ice, wind, and the sea.

Accessibility

Four of the five sculptures will be within walking distance of the Arboretum’s central Visitor Center, and guests will be able to view several of the sculptures from Meadow Lake Trail, which loops around a manmade lake located directly outside the Visitor Center. The 0.6-mile paved asphalt path has a typical grade of 3% and a maximum grade of 8%.

Parking Lot 1 has accessible parking spaces and is close to the Visitor Center and Meadow Lake Trail. The distance from the furthest parking spot to the main entrance of the Visitor Center is one-quarter of a mile. The accessible parking spaces and pathways from Parking Lot 1 to the Visitor Center feature smooth pavers.

Learn more about Accessibility at The Morton Arboretum.