From Art Through The Ages, 9th edition, Volume II: Renaissance and Modern Art. 1991. ISBN: 0-15-503771-4

"Like [Richard] Long, the American sculptor Douglas Hollis (b. 1948) has a strong empathy for natural forces. Hollis has selected accessible sites and designed works intended to re-awaken the sensory perception of visitors to natural processes, especially those of wind. Born in Michigan, Hollis spent many boyhood summers with a Native American family on a reservation in Oklahoma, and this experience left him with a vision of humans as an integral part of nature. This view has guided much of his art, including Site pieces like A Sound Garden, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as one of five art works for their Northwest Center on Lake Washington near Seattle. Hollis selected the hilltop site overlooking the lake for his Sound Garden because he felt a strong empathy with the place. He wanted to create an ongoing "conversation" with the wind---a sound environment that could help people become more attuned to themselves and to nature. Hollis developed his techniques for sound sculpture in earlier kite pieces, wind harps, and wind organs at sites as varied as the roof of San Francisco's Exploratorium and the Niagara River gorge running through Art Park in upstate New York. The eleven sound units of A Sound Garden have upper sections that respond, much like weather vanes, to the action of wind blowing across Lake Washington. Tuned wind-organ pipes embedded in their structures "play" chords as the wind blows across their tops (rather in the manner children use to coax sounds from pop bottles). Hollis designed a special path leading to this piece. The triangular brick paver units used in the path were specially made in different clay mixtures to create different sonic rings as people followed this route to the sculpture site. In contrast to Smithson's and Christo's pieces, which can be well appreciated through photographs and films, Hollis's works are best experienced on-location by individuals. The visitor to A Sound Garden enters a mysterious world in which the physical forms become one with the action and sound of the wind accompanied by sonorous tones created by these giant musical instruments."