The Art of Dr. Seuss
Indoor/Outdoor Sculpture Garden

Show Description

 This sculpture collection pays tribute to Theodor Seuss Geisel and the dynamic collection of books and characters created during his career. Over the course of 54 years, Dr. Seuss produced some of the most recognized and beloved characters of the 20th Century including The Cat in the Hat, Horton the Elephant, The Grinch, The Lorax, Yertle the Turtle, and Green Eggs and Ham’s Sam-I-Am, to name a few.

 For the first time in history, bronze sculptures from the Art of Dr. Seuss Collection are being placed in both public and private collections as enduring tributes to Seuss’s prominent messages and ingeniously inspired nonsense.  To celebrate his artistic legacy, a dynamic new sculpture project was announced on the eve of the Cat in the Hat’s 50^th Birthday.  The project includes a series of maquette and large-scale sculptures commissioned for this milestone event and as an ongoing tribute to Seuss.  These sculptures breathe life into the written word and successfully transform two-dimensional ideas into three-dimensional works of art.

 Also available is his collection of Unorthodox Taxidermy, the wildly imaginative creatures found in Geisel’s early political cartoons and advertising illustrations that have come to life in three dimensions.  A Collection of Unorthodox Taxidermy was born in Ted Geisel’s cramped New York apartment in the early 1930’s.  For years Geisel’s father, a zoo keeper in Springfield, MA, had sent Ted the beaks and horns from zoo animals that had passed away.  These objects eventually proved irrestible, and in 1934 Geisel began work on one of the most creative projects of his lifetime.  Before long, he had sculpted two antlers into the Blue Green Abelard, a beak had become the Andulovian Grackler, and within the year, an entire collection of sculptures took shape.

 Theodor Seuss Geisel single-handedly changed the way generations of children learned to read with his 44 books written between 1937 and 1990. While his most prominent legacy is in children’s literacy, his artistic legacy continues to cross over generations and genres, while singularly impacting the worlds of art, literature, pop and high culture.  Many of today’s top talents pay tribute to Dr. Seuss as a key influence in their own artistic development.

Ted Geisel often said, “I don’t write for children, I write for people.” Respect for his audience prevailed throughout his career and was instrumental in inspiring us to think imaginatively, to see the world differently, and discover our own ingenious answers to life’s thorny questions. Seuss often ended his books by posing a question rather than a moral, as he did in The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax, as well as The Butter Battle Book – where it is inventively up to us to decide how the story concludes. These endings often become beginnings for new intellectual adventures.

 “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.” Dr. Seuss

 With this in mind, savor your time with these wonderfully Seussian characters, lingering by each, recalling your own connection to the lasting messages, enjoyable memories and life principles passed along through them.