Apex opens downtown Brett Gantt Sculpture Walk with 11 works

Downtown Apex now doubles as an outdoor gallery, with 11 sculptures stretching from Hunter Street Park past the town campus at 73 Hunter Street and down North Salem Street to the Hwy 55 intersection. The route gives walkers a reason to move slowly through the historic core, where locally owned shops, murals and public art already shape the streetscape.

The 6th annual Brett Gantt Sculpture Walk opened Saturday and will remain in place from April 2026 through March 2027. Each work is part of the broader Apex Art Collection, and each sculpture includes a QR code that lets visitors vote for a favorite and view a Downtown Art Walk. Voting for the People’s Choice Award runs through June 16, and the most popular piece will be recognized when balloting closes.

This year’s lineup brings together artists from North Carolina and beyond, including Kirk Seese, Arch Jim Gallucci, Adam Walls, Pat Day, Rick Herzog, Harry McDaniel, Joni Younkins-Herzog, Sally Myers, Jessica Bradsher, Aldo Muzzarelli and Sam Spiczka. The town has used the spring sculpture walk every year since the inaugural 2021-2022 edition, and a previous walk drew 11 sculptures from more than 20 submissions, showing that the event has become a competitive and recurring part of Apex’s public-art calendar.

The walk was renamed the Brett Gantt Sculpture Walk in recognition of Council Member Brett Gantt’s contribution to arts and downtown connectivity. That fit with the town’s public-art policy, which says public art should enhance quality of life, match the character of each location and encourage interaction with public spaces. In Apex, that philosophy now reaches directly into a downtown district that the town describes as walkable and historic, giving residents and visitors a new reason to pass storefronts, linger on sidewalks and see the center of town as more than a place to drive through.

Tom Colwell, chairman of the Apex Public Art Committee, has said public art enriches the community, sparks creative imagination, invites people to talk about what the sculptures mean and makes downtown more vibrant and desirable as a destination. The latest sculpture walk turns that idea into a route anyone can follow this spring and beyond, with 11 works anchored in everyday downtown life.