Art, Homes, and a Place to Wonder
Last night we drove up to Hogan Park at Highlands Creek in Aurora, a 100 acre stretch of open space woven through a new neighborhood at The Aurora Highlands. Instead of the usual playground and a couple of picnic tables, this park is built as an open air art gallery, with more than twenty installations spread along a two mile trail that follows a dry creek bed. It’s the kind of place you don’t expect to find in the middle of a housing development.
The decision to tuck the art into the creek corridor is smart. The gentle slope and open views out toward the plains give the pieces a clean backdrop, so you see sculpture, sky, and horizon without the visual noise you usually find in urban and suburban spaces. As a photographer, that simplicity slows you down and makes you pay attention to how the art sits in the landscape.
Broken But Together at Sunset
We timed our visit for evening, hoping for color in the sky, and it delivered. As the sun dropped, the mirrored surfaces of “Broken But Together” started catching everything around it, from the warm glow on the horizon to the clouds sliding by. The sculpture shows two figures standing face to face, hands joined, with fractured sections carved out of their bodies.
Photographing it at sunset was a gift. The reflections shift every few seconds, and it becomes less about the sculpture alone and more about how it holds the sky and the people walking past. I moved around it, lining up the sun as it slipped through the gap between the figures, watching how the camera picked up the mix of broken surfaces and connected hands. It’s a simple visual reminder that life rarely feels neat or complete, yet we are still held together by the relationships we choose.
Meeting Umi
Further down the trail is “Umi,” a large scale sculpture that has already drawn a lot of attention online and in local coverage. The piece looks like a giant figure formed from twisting roots and branches, hands folded, with a calm, protective posture over the park.
We arrived right as the sky moved from bright blue into deeper color. Umi felt anchored there, like she had been watching over that stretch of land longer than the houses around her. Photographing her was less about drama and more about stillness, framing her against the sky, giving space for the horizon, and letting her quiet presence set the tone.
The Only Way Is Through It
Hogan Park is not only sculptures out in the open. There are tunnels and paths that carry the art into the everyday spaces of the neighborhood. One of my favorite pieces from the evening was “The Only Way Out is Through,” a neon and graffiti mural that runs the length of a tunnel. The phrase comes from Robert Frost, and the artists wrapped it in bold color and the image of a phoenix.
It feels like a message planted right where people live their regular lives, walking dogs, biking with kids, and heading home from work. You do not need to go downtown or buy a ticket to encounter it. You just walk the path, step into the tunnel, and you are suddenly standing in front of a wall that tells you to keep going, to push through whatever you are carrying. For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about hope, resilience, and faith, that direct, in your face message is welcome.
A Different Vision for Neighborhoods
The more we walked, the more I thought about how rare this kind of space is in typical developments. Hogan Park is free, open every day, and deliberately designed as a place for people to wander, take photos, sit with their thoughts, and have conversations that usually do not happen in a parking lot.
My hope is that this becomes a model for future home builders. Do more than put up houses and call it a community. Create places that invite people to look around, to walk and talk, to remember that there is more to life than square footage and floor plans. Parks like Hogan give us an excuse to slow down, invite our families and friends into shared moments, and maybe see ourselves a little differently in the process.
We only saw a fraction of the installations, and there are several more we hope to come back and photograph on future visits.
Find out more about Hogan Park: https://theaurorahighlands.com/highlands-creek-park/
