In April, the Bosque Arts Center announced the acquisition and installation of Bruce Greene’s bronze monument Goats in the Garden. The 1,200-pound piece now sits at the entrance to the center in Clifton, Texas, in Bosque County. Greene, who lives in Clifton, was on hand for the unveiling and installation.
The monument was commissioned and donated to the center by Roland and Joyce Jones. It is a remake of a piece Greene did while serving as an artist in residence at the center early in his career.
Bruce Greene, Goats in the Garden, bronze, 84 in.
“I was dusting some of the sculptures off one day and I looked at the original Goats in Garden. I thought, ‘Hmm, wouldn’t that look good if it were 5 feet tall?’ So I called Bruce,” Joyce Jones relates. She told him, “She’d be impressive and it would be a beautiful tribute to all those women that left their homes in Pennsylvania and Boston…wagons and horses and going who knows where. They had faith that it would be something they could live with. They would have had to pry me out of Boston with a crowbar.”
Jones had to wear him down a little, but Greene relented and started working on the monument. “But she’d call me every once in a while and she’d say, ‘You know, don’t know how long I’m going to be around,’” Greene says. “No pressure.”
During the dedication of the piece, the artist acknowledged both Roland and Joyce for their kindness and support. “There’s no way I can express to you the gratitude I have for Roland and Joyce,” he told guests at the unveiling. “What a treasure they are.”
The bronze monument comes with a brief passage that explains the state of the figure:
“She’s hot; she’s tired. She hasn’t sat down for a minute all day. The children have not been quiet…The husband has gone to town for seed. He won’t be back till dark. There’s enough water left in the bucket for her to wash her hands so she can fix something for the children. And she looks out the window at the beautiful garden…and Heavens to Betsy! If it hasn’t been bad enough, there are Goats in the Garden.” —
Powered by Froala Editor
