Pioneer Woman (Friedlander)

Texas

The winning design for a monument to Texas pioneer women showed the whole family, naked.

culturehistoricalpeople

A jury of professionals looked at the plaster models and picked one without argument. It came from William Zorach, a sculptor from New York. His version was not a lone settler woman. It was the entire family. Mother, father, son and daughter. And every one of them was nude. Nudity passed as classical or allegorical elsewhere. For Texas settler women it did not pass at all. Protests came in from across the state. Zorach revised his model and put clothes on the figures, but it was too late. The commission reversed itself and announced that no one had won the competition after all. Then it handed the job quietly to Leo Friedlander, a sculptor who had never entered. His Pioneer Woman stands on the campus of Texas Woman's University in Denton, made for the hundredth anniversary of Texas independence from Mexico.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
And they were all nude.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Lewisville Lake 14.3 mi While building the dam here, Army engineers stumbled onto artifacts that seemed to say people lived in Texas thirty-six thousand years ago.
  • Lewisville, Texas 14.6 mi Thirteen days after Woodstock, a small Texas town drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to hear Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin.
  • Texas International Pop Festival 17.4 mi Two weeks after Woodstock, a field outside Lewisville drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to see Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and B.B. King.
  • Grapevine Lake 17.9 mi Four bones found beside this Texas reservoir belonged to a bird that lived ninety-six million years ago.
  • Grapevine, Texas 20.1 mi For decades a sign outside town called Grapevine the Cantaloupe Capital of the World.
  • North Lake (Dallas) 21 mi A popular Dallas water sports lake shut down in 2000, and the suspected reason was amoebas thriving in water warmed by a power plant.