Sherry Edmundson Fry: Iowa Time Machine September 29, 1879

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On September 29, 1879, Sherry Edmundson Fry was born in Creston, Iowa, beginning a career that joined art, public memory, and military innovation. Fry is best remembered in Iowa for the bronze statue of Mahaska on the Oskaloosa Square, but his story reaches far beyond one monument.

After high school, he studied under the influential sculptor Lorado Taft at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, beginning in 1900. He continued his training in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, absorbing the Beaux-Arts traditions that shaped much public art in the United States during the early twentieth century.

In 1906, while living in Paris, he accepted the commission to create a statue of Mahaska, also known as White Cloud, the nineteenth-century Ioway leader for whom Mahaska County was named. Fry returned to Iowa to study Meskwaki people at the settlement near Tama and to examine reference materials before completing his design in France. The bronze sculpture arrived in Oskaloosa by rail in 1908 and was dedicated on May 12, 1909, before a crowd estimated at 12,000 people.

During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army Camouflage Corps, a unit that recruited artists because their skill with form, color, perspective, and visual deception could help conceal artillery positions and other military targets. Fry was among the first men to enlist in Company A of the 40th Engineers and worked near the front in France. He did not invent camouflage, which had earlier roots in military practice and natural observation, but he became a significant participant in the American Army’s early organized camouflage program. #Iowa #OTD #History #Art #Camo