Pioneer Woman Statue

About this property

The Pioneer Woman monument is a bronze sculpture in Ponca City, Oklahoma, designed by Bryant Baker and dedicated on April 22, 1930. The statue is of a sunbonneted woman leading a child by the hand. It was donated to the State of Oklahoma by millionaire oilman E. W. Marland. He commissioned models from twelve well-known sculptors and financed a nationwide tour to get feedback from art critics and the general public in order to decide which model to use for the final statue. Around 1925 Marland sketched out an ambitious sculptural program to sculptor Jo Davidson involving numerous statues based on the theme of the settling of the American West and attempted to persuade Davidson to take it on. When Davidson declined Marland replies that he could pay for it, prompting Davidson to come back with "I don't doubt it for a minute, but I don't see myself working for you for the rest of my life." Marland ultimately convinced Davidson to go to Ponca City, Marland's then home town, and create three statues for him: one of Marland and one of each of Marland's adopted children, Lydie and George. While Davidson was producing his three Marland statues E.W. told him of another project that he has in mind, "E.W.'s most cherished dream." Davidson writes, " It was to be a twenty-five foot figure, which he planned to put up on a hill where it could be seen for miles ... E.W. brought his friends to see what I was doing. He acted as if he was the sculptor, and in conversation would say that he was doing the figure - that I was his hands." At that point Marland sent out invitations to many of America's leading sculptors, offering them each a $10,000 honorarium to produce a roughly 3 feet (0.9 m) tall bronze model for the statue. He further proposed that the models tour the United States and that the American public vote as to which of the models would be erected in Ponca City. Several sculptors, Daniel Chester French, George Grey Barnard and Paul Manship turned Marland down, also declining were the only two women invited, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Anna Hyatt Huntington, leaving him with an even dozen artists, all males. The artists who submitted models were Bryant Baker, A, Stirling Calder, Jo Davidson, James Earle Fraser, John Gregory, F. Lynn Jenkins, Mario Korbel, Arthur Lee, Hermon Atkins MacNeil, Maurice Sterne, Mahonri Young, and Wheeler Williams. The models were to tour America and everyone who visited the sites where they were exhibited was allowed to vote for their favorite. Marland's original idea was to have a woman in pioneer dress accompanied by a child, and so he provided a sunbonnet to each sculptor. While the artists were not limited to these ideas, nine of the twelve models included a sunbonnet and all save for Jo Davidson's included a child. Both Davidson and Calder visited Oklahoma to gain further inspiration.

Location

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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