In 1987 Bill Nebeker created If Horses Could Talk, a bronze work showing a hunter peering through binoculars on a rocky outcropping. The piece had a humorous twist: a deer is quietly sneaking under the ledge that the hunter is sitting on…if only the horse could just tell the hunter. 
Bill Nebeker with his monument of If Horses Could Talk, which is destined for Prescott, Arizona.
Welders piece together If Horses Could TalkThat small work is being turned into a massive monument for Prescott, Arizona, Nebeker’s hometown. The life-and-a-half-sized work will sit in the center of a roundabout on a major thoroughfare through Prescott. Although it’s based on a smaller bronze, the artist had to design it from the ground up due to the large scale of the monument. “When you’re standing underneath something that big, it looks different when you’re looking up at it, so I’ve changed the original design in several places,” Nebeker said from his studio in 2018 during work on the initial maquette version in clay. 
The smaller 1987 version of If Horses Could Talk by Bill Nebeker.
A large clay version was eventually cast as several dozen pieces while the City of Prescott and Arizona Department of Transportation worked through the logistics of the installation and maintenance of the piece of public art. If Horses Could Talk was slated for a late 2019 installation. —
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