Sioux Warrior

This is the third in a series of winter images from the sculpture garden at the Joslyn Art Museum.

Sioux Warrior (2008) by Serbian-born sculptor John David Brcin (1899– 1983) and Omaha sculptor Matthew Placzek (American, born 1964) John David Brcin was a 30-year-old, award-winning sculptor working in Chicago when architects John and Alan McDonald chose him to create the ambitious sculptural program for the exterior of the Joslyn Art Museum building. While the sculpture on the Joslyn building is Brcin’s masterpiece, one element of his vision was, for various reasons, dropped from the final plan. The artist had proposed that two life-size bronze equestrian statues stand at either side of the main east steps: a Sioux warrior and a Pony Express rider. Of the two, Brcin ultimately completed only a plaster model of the Sioux warrior. Fifteen feet high, the 5,000-pound bronze sculpture sits atop a six-foot base of concrete encased in Lake Superior Green granite. The Art Decostyle rearing horse and Indian rider face north.

Using Brcin’s plaster prototype as a model, Omaha sculptor Matthew Placzek recreated the sculpture point by point in clay. The sculpture took its final format a foundry in Colorado, where about 100 individual bronze pieces were welded together over a stainless-steel infrastructure.

Museum purchase, 2008

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