Pioneer Woman statue

This Pioneer Woman was created for the 1958 centennial of Minnesota statehood. Although sculpted from modern fiberglass, it closely resembles bronze pioneer mother monuments from the 1920s. It has become a familiar landmark on the Minnesota state fairgrounds.

The Minnesota Centennial Women’s Committee hired local artist Gordon Shumaker to sculpt this twenty-foot-tall Pioneer Woman for the state fairgrounds. The monument portrayed traditional pioneer mother monument artistic elements constructed from modern materials.

Shumaker dressed his highly traditional pioneer woman in both a sunbonnet and a shawl across her shoulders. In so doing, he combined other artistic traditions for pioneer mother monuments: wide-brimmed sunbonnets and Madonna-like headscarves. The book in her right hand and the satchel hanging from her right elbow replicate Bryant Baker’s famous 1929 Pioneer Woman in Ponca City, Oklahoma. But Baker’s statue included a young boy to balance those burdens artistically and symbolically, representing hope for the future. Shumaker instead depicted a woman striding placidly westward. Her pose more closely resembles the solo woman in Leo Friedlander’s Pioneer Woman that was erected in Denton, Texas, in the 1930s.

In an apparent nod to the more avant-garde art movements of the 1950s, such as pop art’s focus on consumerism, Shumaker produced his Pioneer Woman from oddly modern and ephemeral fiberglass. Shumaker he then painted that fiberglass to resemble the enduring bronze that had been favored at the height of the Pioneer Mother movement. Existing records do not reveal whether Shumaker and the donors intentionally sought to play with modernity and tradition in this monument. It is possible that postwar civic frugality inspired him to paint state-of-the-art fiberglass to resemble traditional bronze.

Newspaper coverage suggests that Shumaker’s efforts to adapt the iconography of that movement to the postwar era received little attention amid state centennial events. Prior to 1940, monument dedications were major events typically receiving extensive newspaper coverage, particularly when mounted to mark a local anniversary. By contrast, although Shumaker’s Pioneer Woman was featured prominently in advertisements for the fair, the statue itself appears to have elicited little excitement. Its dedication became just one of many events that occurred amid the circus-like atmosphere of centennial celebrations centered at the Minnesota State Fair—all of which lost much of their luster amid heavy rainstorms. As the fiberglass statue aged over the next several decades, however, it became widely accepted—and widely photographed—as a supposedly traditional feature of the fair.

Flanagan, Barbara. “State Bids Fair to Honor Its 100th Birthday.” Minneapolis Morning Tribune August 23, 1958.

Flanagan, Barbara. “Fair Begins, Meets a New Princess Kay.” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, August 24, 1958.

Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.