No experience I have had with The Big Heads will top the day I saw them for the first time. I was visiting Glen Maury Park, in Buena Vista, Virginia, as I do every year for the Rockbridge Mountain Music & Dance Festival. Down in the campground Friday night, amid the sound of fiddles and banjos in the dark, rumors swirled about three giant heads parked on the hill above the park. Although it sounded like a joke, I made plans to go up there the next day. Their stark and inexplicable presence elicited a reaction to which I'm admittedly prone: I laughed my butt off. The second and third reactions to which I'm prone are to whip out a camera, and later, write about my experience. Thus was born the part of Julie's Tacky Treasures that was originally called "Big Heads in Buena Vista."

This, however, will be my last word on the Big Heads. The heads finally have a home in Presidents Park of Williamsburg, Virginia. Those who want to read about my obsession with the Big Heads can find the periodic accounts I posted in the archived Big Heads page. While I've enjoyed the correspondence this page has generated, and the pictures I've been sent, it's time to move on and become obsessed with something else.

And so, with further ado, here's my review of Presidents Park.

On July 20, 2004, I visited the Big Heads at Presidents Park in Williamsburg, Virginia, for what I expect will be the last time. Now closely packed in a couple of acres, they lack the mystique they had when they turned up on that hill in Buena Vista for no apparent reason. I'll never forget the affect that they had on me back in September 2000 when I first saw them, looking more like Easter Island monoliths than an homage to Mount Rushmore. Something about the lack of interpretive text about them allowed my imagination to go a little crazy wondering what they were doing there. Perhaps they were left there by aliens trying to communicate with Americans by relating to our obvious predilection for gigantic public art. They might have been left as a college prank by those wacky students at Washington & Lee University, or even local practical joker Mark Cline of the neighboring town of Natural Bridge.

The truth was even more interesting to a self-proclaimed arbiter of bad taste such as myself. In a nutshell, a motel owner in Williamsburg ordered up the heads for a park he planned without applying for the proper permits. The first time that the county commissioners knew of the plans was when a half a dozen or more enormous concrete heads showed up in the motel parking lot on flatbed trucks. I will admit to being amused, and perhaps even charmed, by the naïvete of the motel owner to think that a display of 43 eighteen-foot concrete heads would be welcomed by the local officials. Even after they talked him out of the 92-foot, full-body statue of George Washington, they still balked at an attraction that they deemed inappropriate and "tacky."

I reported periodically about the vicissitudes of nine of these heads, which had to find other homes while the commissioners, the owner, the artist, and likely several lawyers worked out a solution. In the meantime, I received several emails about my story on the Big Heads, including several reports of sightings of dozens of these heads at artist David Adickes headquarters in Houston, Texas. I even received a polite note from an employee of the South Dakota version of Presidents Park (a third park, in Florida, is also being planned). In addition, his girlfriend also wrote to me, urging me to visit South Dakota and see that the park, and the state of South Dakota itself, is not nearly as tacky as I seemed to think. Of course, I plan someday to visit South Dakota. However, I cannot guarantee that I'll come to the conclusion that she expects.

In a nutshell, I found Presidents Park to be dull and uninspiring. It's not just the lack of interaction (all you do is walk around the park and read signs), but I don't think that Adickes' sculpture captures the statesman-like qualities of our greatest Presidents. There is a certain something lacking in the setting that fails to live up to Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial. George Washington has a garden hose set up behind him, and you can't get a good picture of Abraham Lincoln without that enormous antenna in it.

Most of the likenesses of the Presidents were good enough, but lacked some intangible inspirational quality that other sculptors have been able to capture while Adickes has not. In a couple of cases, the likenesses of the Presidents were off enough to be a distraction. For example, Harry S Truman was easily recognizable. But there's something not quite right about the shape of John F. Kennedy's face. Other the other hand, I think Adickes totally nailed the deer-in-the-headlights in look in the eyes of both George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

The Big Heads as they appeared in Buena Vista, Virginia in September 2000

The Big Heads in their current home, Presidents Park, Williamsburg, Virginia