If you’re driving on Interstate 80 through Colorado, Nebraska, or Iowa next week, and you see three, massive bison on the back of a flatbed truck, you’re likely getting a first peek at the latest work by Missouri artist Gary Staab.
The bronze sculptures of a bull, cow, and calf will be traveling on a weeklong, cross-country road trip from the foundry where they were cast in Loveland, Colorado, to join the collection of the largest natural history museum in the world.
“Bison are so amazing, as far as their structure, so they're really fun to sculpt,” Staab says, “because they have a lot of great shapes inside of that beautiful silhouette that they make.”
The Smithsonian's National History Museum commissioned the trio to celebrate the national mammal and commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The works will be installed on a pair of granite plinths flanking the museum’s entrance on March 19.
To help the prairie grazers look at home among the Greco-Roman columns on the National Mall, Staab sculpted the animals on a heroic scale.
“You're creating something that will be there for generations, so as an artist, you want to create something that's accurate,” he says, “and then also, you know, exciting.”
So, while a normal bull bison is 6-feet-tall at the shoulder, Staab’s is 10 feet tall, and weighs more than 2,000 pounds. As visitors climb the museum’s marble steps, the massive beasts will loom over them.
Staab says the sculptures capture the animal’s full life cycle.
“We have the calf that's maybe getting ready to nudge Mom for a meal,” he explains. “And the bull is striding out and cutting a fine silhouette as they, as they do.”
Staab’s sculptures of dinosaurs grace museums around the country, including the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in New Jersey and the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Florida. But when he first learned about this project, Staab says he felt a bit intimidated.
“Given the pride of placement on the National Mall, it's kind of humbling to be involved in the project, to be honest,” he says.
The National History Museum’s collection includes more than 148 million specimens — not including the three burly bovines.
“It became very clear that if we put the bison at life size, the building would diminish them, but if we made them larger than life that they would look appropriate,” says museum Director Kirk Johnson. “We wanted the bison not to look like mice, but to look like bison.”
Johnson will join Stabb to help shuttle the bison to the nation’s capitol for what the museum is calling a “cross-country stampede.”
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is the first stop on a tour of natural history museums in Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. Johnson says the sculptures will be a monument to how the creature shaped the country’s history.
“The bison is such an iconic American animal. It has its roots in Asia because bison migrated across the Bering Land Bridge into North America,” Johnson says.
Fossils of ancient bison have been unearthed as far north as Alaska and into Southern Mexico.
“George Washington shot a bison in West Virginia, and there's records of bison here on the Potomac in Virginia, even back in the 1600s,” Johnson says. “So it is very much like the archetypal American animal.”
Lewis and Clark noted in 1806 that they encountered immense herds of bison in territory that later became South Dakota. The grazers “darkened the whole plains,” they wrote.
But the animals were hunted close to extinction.
“Bison grew to huge numbers in the Great Plains and numbered as many as 35 to 45 million bison,” Johnson says. “But they were really radically exterminated.”
By the close of the 19th century, there were fewer than 1,000 bison left in North America.
The Natural History Museum sparked the effort to save the species from disappearing. Museum taxidermist William Temple Hornaday traveled to Montana in 1886 to collect specimens of bison for a display. Hornaday also brought back a small herd of live bison that were kept in a fenced enclosure on the National Mall.
The modern conservation movement started by Hornaday led to a recovery of the bison population. Today, there are roughly half a million bison, in all 50 states.
Staab’s bull bison sculpture is based on the specimens created by Hornaday.
“The trick is to try and create some small story in a very limited amount of space,” Staab says. “It's important to watch them and observe them. You have to try and breathe the same air as that animal, you know, get close to them to understand how they move.”
