"Rosemary Beach has beautiful pocket parks, greens, and focal points, many of which are easily missed in the hustle of daily life. Sculptures draw our attention to not only the art but also its surroundings." — Alisa Ghazvini, Project Director, Rosemary Beach Sculpture Exhibition
Walk the greens between North Barrett Square and the beach access on any given evening and you'll pass pieces of outdoor sculpture that feel like they've always been there. Most of them haven't, and most of them won't stay. Of everything currently standing in the town's pocket parks and gardens, only six pieces are permanent. Everything else is on loan, priced for sale, and gone within two years unless the town decides to keep it.
That's the part of Rosemary Beach's public art program that doesn't make it into the postcard description. It isn't a museum. It's closer to a rotating gallery with a two-year lease, and this fall the town's fifth cycle opens.
Only Six Pieces Are Actually Staying Put
The permanent collection includes a handful of works that earned their place by outlasting the churn. The best-known is Colors of My Mind, the late George Rodrigue's blue dog piece in East Long Green Park, donated by his widow, Wendy Wolfe Magnus, when the exhibition launched in 2017. Another is Votive by Gregory Johnson, which won Best in Show at that same inaugural exhibition and was purchased outright by the Rosemary Beach Property Owners Association at the show's close. It now sits in North Barrett Square, one of the few sculptures in town that isn't wearing a price tag.
Everything else that has appeared since 2017 was built to leave. When the fourth exhibition closed on October 19, 2025, its nine rotating sculptures went up for sale to private collectors, the same fate as every non-permanent piece before them. If a work doesn't get purchased by the POA the way Votive did, it disperses, sometimes to a buyer in another state, sometimes back to the artist's own collection.
Why the Parks Look a Little Sparser Right Now
If you've noticed fewer sculptures on your regular walk this year, that's not an oversight. The fourth exhibition closed in October 2025, and the fifth doesn't open until Saturday, October 17, 2026. For most of the past ten months, the only artwork on public display has been the six permanent pieces. The pocket parks and greens that normally hold nine or more rotating works have been running lean while the Rosemary Beach Sculpture Exhibition committee finished jurying the next round.
That gap isn't a gap in the sense of something going wrong. It's built into the biennial rhythm. The nonprofit committee put out its Call to Artists in January 2026, reviewed submissions through the spring, and is finalizing installation now, with about ten weeks left before the new works go up. The quiet stretch is the space between harvests, not a sign the program lost momentum.
Five Cycles In, the Selections Keep Getting Tighter
What's easy to miss, because each exhibition gets covered as its own standalone event, is the pattern across all five cycles. The number of new sculptures chosen for the collection has actually shrunk over time, even as the pool of artists competing for a spot has grown.
| Exhibition | Dates | New Works Selected | Notable Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | May–October 2017 | 11 | Introduced Votive, later purchased by the POA as a permanent piece |
| Second | May 2019–February 2020 | 16 | Drew more than 130 applications, the largest new-work count to date |
| Third | September 2021–September 2022 | 14 | Selected from 80 submissions by 41 artists across 25 states, Washington, D.C., and Spain |
| Fourth | October 2024–October 2025 | 9 | Chosen from what the committee called a record number of submissions |
| Fifth | Opens October 17, 2026 | To be revealed | Jurying underway following a January 2026 Call to Artists |
The fourth cycle drew the most competitive field the exhibition has ever seen and produced its smallest new-work count. That's worth sitting with. It suggests the jury isn't simply filling open plots in the greens each cycle. It's getting more selective about what earns a spot, even as more artists want in.
Add up every new sculpture selected since 2017 and you get 50, plus the six permanent works, for a total of 56 pieces that have rotated through a town that covers just 107 acres and 2,500 feet of beach. That's a meaningful concentration of public art for a footprint that size, and it's the reason a walk from the town hall to the beach access can feel like a small gallery circuit rather than a stroll past landscaping.
What Actually Happens on October 17
Based on how the last opening ran, expect a familiar sequence. The 2024-25 exhibition kicked off with a Patrons Party at The Pearl Hotel, where artists including Earl Dismuke, Luke Achterberg, Steven Buduo, and Cecilia Moseley talked through their process with attendees. Curate30A hosted an open house with a self-guided walkthrough the following days, pouring what the exhibition's own recap called a Sip-n-Stroll for guests carrying their new catalogs. Printed maps and descriptions have shown up on the checkout counter at The Hidden Lantern Bookstore in past cycles, which is often how residents who aren't tracking the exhibition calendar first learn a new show is up.
Once the new pieces are installed, the free Otocast smartphone app carries a short audio introduction from each artist, so you can stand in front of a piece and hear the person who made it explain what you're looking at. There's also a People's Choice Award, voted on through the exhibition's website, which gives residents an actual say in which piece gets remembered as a crowd favorite even if it doesn't end up purchased for the permanent collection.
The Infrastructure Behind the Art
None of this runs on goodwill alone. The RBSE is a nonprofit with an eleven-member volunteer committee, currently led by Ghazvini, working alongside the Rosemary Beach Property Owners Association and its Townscape Enhancement Committee to select installation sites, coordinate logistics, and manage sales at closing. The program also partners with the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County as part of Art Month South Walton, which places Rosemary Beach's sculpture program inside a broader county-level push for public art rather than treating it as a private town amenity.
The whole structure traces back to 2015, when original homeowner Tom Kramer came home from a trip to Europe with the idea after seeing an outdoor sculpture exhibition abroad. Working with then-Town Manager David Bailey, he spent roughly two years building the framework before the first show opened in 2017. Kramer has since moved on to other projects, but the committee he helped start is now five cycles deep into a system built to keep running without him.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
By the time the fifth exhibition opens on October 17, the pieces going into the ground will have come through the tightest jurying process the program has run. Some will get bought by visitors and leave the state within the year. One or two might catch on the way Votive did and end up purchased for keeps. Most will be gone within a couple of years, replaced by another round selected from an even larger applicant pool.
That turnover is the whole point. The sculptures aren't meant to blend into the landscaping so completely that you stop noticing them. They're meant to be seen while they're here, because in a year or two, they won't be.
If you're weighing a move to Rosemary Beach or another stretch of 30A and want a local read on what daily life actually looks like here, beyond the postcard version, Dickson Group is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.
