Tuscarora

Born in Santa Rosa, California, Michael Dunbar came from a family of artists and architects. For his first twenty-five years of sculpting, he created figurative work, then switched to abstract. The transition occurred after he studied the work of sculptor Henry Moore. He enrolled in a foundry class at Illinois State University in Bloomington and became enamored with bronze as a conduit for his creativity.

Tuscarora, stems from a series of sculptures Dunbar named Machinist Studies. This series began with a group of drawings he made in 1975, inspired by his recent enthusiasm for bronze. Though many of his machinist studies metamorphosed into large-scale, public sculpture, Tuscarora has yet to reach that stage, and remains a maquette, a model "in waiting" to become one day a monumental work.

Though a small-scale work for Dunbar, Tuscarora strikes a large impression aesthetically. The sleek design and precision of execution entice careful examination by the viewer. Dunbar purposely exposes the complicated joinery of the bronze segments, utilizing the machinery as artistic motif. The overall sculpture indeed evokes machinery yet is unsparingly artful and imaginative. Remarkably, though clearly a static object, Tuscarora implies movement by nature of its complicated system of disparate, yet harmonious components.

The title Tuscarora pays homage to a mountain range in central Pennsylvania that Dunbar encountered on his drives from the Midwest to New York City. Tuscarora was the last large range of hills before he reached Manhattan, and he reminisced how this evoked a sense of excitement and thrill for him.

Dunbar’s monumental outdoor sculptures reside throughout the country, notably at Kettering University, Flint, Michigan; Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa; University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana; and the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park at Governor State University, Chicago Heights. He was honored internationally when in 2016 he was one of two American sculptors invited, along with thirty-three international sculptors, to create a work for the Fifth China, Wuhu Liu Kaiqu, International Sculpture Exhibition. Dunbar’s work, Iron Mountain, was fabricated in Beijing, China and was one of the few works selected to remain in the permanent collection of the Wuhu Sculpture Park in Wuhu, China. Weighing six tons and standing fifteen feet by twenty feet, the steel sculpture is testament to his abilities and reputation.