Gerald Shippen – 2020 Brinton 101

Photograph of Gerald Shippen with a turkey sculptureBorn Lander, Wyoming, 1955, citizen of New Zealand, studied art in Carrara, Italy 1976-77. Received MFA in Fine Art, University of Wyoming, 1984. Competed numerous public and private art commissions. International exhibitions: United States Art in Embassies, United Arab Emirates, International Print Exhibition, Taipei, Taiwan. Numerous gallery exhibitions, work held in collections worldwide.

“My study in indigenous culture began during my childhood on the Wind River Indian Reservation where I grew up with children from the Shoshone and Arapahoe tribes. Inter­ school sports activities tossed the kids all-together; most of my Indian friends were a lean bunch who could run like the wind with endless endurance and who relished any form of skirmish.

Human anatomy was there for the studying, all the kids were skinny and many enjoyed a dip in the local steams and irrigation canals; meltwater fresh from the glaciers just ten miles upstream!

Abiding one’s interests, has been my modus operandi. Ethnographic study from cultures world-wide brought new perspectives into the lives of past peoples. Paleo cultures from the Amazon to the Kalahari and from Australia to the Arctic all operate by the same practical principles. Northwestern Wyoming with perhaps twelve thousand years of occupation follows the same. Yet as one looks across the landscape today it is possible that we are seeing the same landscape seen by those early inhabitants. River courses, mountain profiles, even vegetation all would be recognizable to early inhabitants.

Buffalo Jump Studio just a few hundred feet upstream and over from, an ancient bison kill site on Sage Creek, near its confluence with the Shoshone River. This location has afforded an opportunity to build, in form and function, a place to study and make art, and to live close to and immersed in material culture from earlier times.” Gerald Shippen

“A small compact space designed to contain big dreams. While abstract in its imagery, my medallion represents endless buffalo tracks; signs on the land that predict prosperity and good times ahead. In the design a complete circle is broken into four quarter circles, each representing one-half of the buffalo’s cloven-hoof. Four small squares become dewclaws. This design appears on the moccasins of the Sentinel of the Plains monument.” Gerald Shippen