About the Artist: Florence Bird

 

 

All of my life I have been making art.  My plans are to continue doing so as long as I can hold the tools.  First childhood lessons were at the Cleveland Art Museum.  My degrees include a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MA from San Diego State University.  I have taught art to people of all ages including college students, adults and children.

 

I am perhaps best known as sculptor for the Mississippi River Sculpture Park in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.   There I am creating life size bronze historical figures illustrating 12,000 years of history that has taken place at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers.  There is no other place like it.  Our national heritage has been defined by the discoveries of early explorers and missionaries, continuing yearly tribal rendezvous, and the signing of historical treaties all taking place on St Feriole Island by this broad plain, now called Prairie du Chien.  This is also an area where mastodon hunters and ancient mound builders have left cultural evidence, where giant beavers and saber tooth tigers hunted and were hunted.   Through my art I come to know these people.  Bronze will last for seven times seven generations.  Our descendants into the unimaginable future will know about us by visiting these bronze figures.

 

Creating portraits in whatever media, bronze, paper, paint or pencil gives me the opportunity to express my deep love and respect for us as individuals and for our common humanity.  My sculpture projects continue with other historical and mythological groups and figures.

 

I have deeply rooted appreciation for our earth and sky and waterways.  My landscape paintings are prayers about the beauty surrounding us.

 

Florence Bird

 

Florence Bird Studio, LLC

137 Pedretti Pkwy, Prairie du Chien, WI 53821

608-432-8848

florence@florencebird.com