Fall Guide

Behind the Scenes at the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular

How 5,000 pumpkins become stunning works of art at Roger Williams Park Zoo

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Thousands of faces leer at you from the darkness, their pumpkin grins illuminated by flickering light. Some seem pleasant enough for disembodied heads, others have a more sinister something in their crooked smiles. But you love it. It’s one of the coolest things about fall in Rhode Island.

The Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo is a tradition that never gets old. Each year, thousands of pumpkins are transformed, not just into bucktoothed jack-o-lanterns, but into intricate pieces of art. Last year featured stunning displays of Hollywood’s Golden Age, carved with painstaking attention to detail into massive pumpkins. There’s always a theme – this year’s is American Treasures – but there are always welcome, familiar sights like celebrities, cartoon characters and a whole zoo’s worth of animals. 

Each year, the question we all ask ourselves is “How do they do it?”

Ahead of the Spectacular, we took a tour of the pumpkin trail in broad daylight. There was no music and no crowd, but there were crews hard at work preparing lights, platforms and backgrounds for the displays. And of course, there were the pumpkins.
Everything from small, reasonably sized pumpkins that get strung up from trees to big, monster squash that weigh over 1,000 pounds get carved up in September – not too early, these are perishable materials we’re talking about –by the creative team of Passion for Pumpkins. John Reckner started Passion for Pumpkins after seeing a simple jack-o-lantern display in Vermont and realized that combining artful pumpkin carving with music in a dark, wooded setting was the perfect way to celebrate the season.

Jump ahead 30 years and the group has been installing pumpkin art installations all over New England, but the crown jewel of their year’s work is the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo.

Later we met volunteers who were busy scooping out the seedy insides of the smaller pumpkins that would fill out the spaces between the more intricate pieces. During the spectacular we tend to lock in on the pumpkins with Elvis’ face or Maria from The Sound of Music on them, but when you see people hollowing out and piling up the little guys, the unsung heroes of the show, you realize that each of these jack-o-lanterns is a work of art. Of course the work doesn’t stop once the show starts. Every pumpkin is changed weekly – yes, every pumpkin – to maintain the show’s appearance. Since the bigger ones are so labor intensive, they’re dried out to add an extra few days to their shelf life.

As impressive as seeing the finished pumpkins are, seeing the work that goes into them really drives home that what these artists do is truly unique. During our visit we saw a work in progress that depicted Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse being swept to Oz by a twister. When your canvas is a one-ton vegetable there’s no backsies; every stroke had to be perfect and I walked away with a newfound appreciation for my delete key.

The Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular
October 6-November 6
1000 Elmwood Avenue, Providence
401-785-3510
RWPZoo.org/Jack-O-Lantern-Spectacular

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