Dan Ostermiller Sculpture Featured in Santa Fe Botanic Gardens

Sculpture Digest | June 10, 2018 | Exhibitions

Gardens Gone Wild Sculpture by Dan Ostermiller

In an exhibit that opened May 26 at the Santa Fe Bontanical Garden, visitors will be able to see all sorts of wildlife that doesn’t normally reside there. That’s because these are the wildlife sculptures by the extremely talented Dan Ostermiller.

Sculptor Dan Ostermiller is a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming and has called Loveland, Colorado home for more that forty years. So you can be sure that Ostermiller has seen plenty of real wildlife from which he draws his inspiration, although he hasn’t actually come out and said he’s seen two bears wrestling like Boys Will be Boys, above.

Dan is one of the leaders in Loveland’s thriving sculpture community. He helped start the annual Sculpture in the Park show and sale which is held the second weekend of August. He had his first solo exhbition in 1980. Dan continues to live and work in Loveland while exhibiting his work around the country. He is also a member of the Society of Animal Artists and Allied Artists of America, and a fellow and served as First Vice-President of the National Sculpture Society.

Not all of the sculptures are of wildlife–some feature animals we find in the barnyard. Case in point, Melba, seen below. This is no ordinary chicken, however. Melba measures 6 feet high.

American Gold bronze by sculptor Dan Ostermiller

The sleeping bear pictured below is called Indigo’s Dream. Ostermiller told the Loveland Reporter-Herald that this piece was inspired by a different four-legged animal. He had an Irish Wolfhound that would lay like that,

“He’d sleep that way so I loved that pose and I wanted to do it so I thought maybe he is dreaming of being a bear,” said the sculptor

The Santa Fe Botanical Garden exhibition: Gardens Gone Wild runs now through Mary 12, 2019. Even if you can’t make the Botanical Garden show, you can catch one of Dan’s critters at Nedra Matteucci’s Santa Fe gallery on Paseo de Peralta.

And keep an eye out for Gardens Gone Wild and its Dan Ostermiller sculptures as it travels around the country. Some of the sculptures in other Gardens will vary. Santa Fe had a special requirement that all the animals depicted had to be native to North America. In addition, each garden gives it’s own feel to the exhibit because they vary in overall size as well as the flora and other garden elements they feature.