b'visitors to his home community on Padre Island. His sculpture of Kemps Rid-ley sea turtles is the centerpiece of the Padre Island park that bears his name.One of Ullbergs most celebrated artistic accomplishments was also a much-celebrated accomplishment in science, his bronze monument, Deinonychus, translated Terrible Claw, based entirely on a fossilized dinosaur skeleton that was well more than 100 million years old. Placed above the Logan Square entrance to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, it was the first known bronze sculpture of a dinosaur installed anywhere in the world, in 1987. Americans later got to know them in the Jurassic Park films.By 1990, Kent Ullberg had climbed to the top of the North American art world, being paid well to do what he loved and recognized by his peers for his pro-lific excellence and the consistently high quality of his work. He was elected a full Academician by the National Academy of Art in New York, and he had even formed a personal friendship with his childhood inspiration, Robert Tory Peterson, the birding artist and conservationist who once visited the Ullbergs at their home on Padre Island.Kent Ullberg openly and warmly proclaims his debt of gratitude to the Unit-ed States, where he is a naturalized citizen, and which he says offered the freedom and commercial opportunities that enabled him to live his dream of becoming a working artist. Much of his early work was done at his home studio on Padre Island, but years ago Ullberg built a spanning studio complex in Loveland, Colorado, close to his first adopted home in America and to the foundries where his monuments are fabricated.Ullbergs selection of projects over the second half of his artistic career have been those that have offered opportunities to reach new benchmarks in the worldofreal-life,monumentalsculpture.The21-foot,bronzemonument, Fighting Bull, sets atop the football stadium at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ullberg installed a life-sized monument of an African elephant, Reaching Elephant, at the St. Louis Zoo in 2010not to be outdone, Ullbergs first employer in the United States, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, commissioned their own 19-foot pachyderm, that of an ancient American Mastodon, called Snowmastodon, installed in 2004.In the late 1990s, Ullberg was challenged by the First National Bank of Oma-ha to create a history-making public art display in celebration of the banks centennial. The concept was a flock of Canadian geese, startled into flight by a herd of American Bison, together traveling through a five-block section of downtown Omaha. In 2002, the installation of 58 Canadian geese in bronze and stainless steel, flying into and out of buildings, attached to lampposts and soaring above busy intersections, completed the first stage of what would be-come the largest sculpture installation in the modern world. The final stage of the Spirit of Nebraskas Wilderness project was completed in 2009 with the installation of the last nine American Bison monuments.In 2012, Ullberg delivered what was among his most challenging work, In-terdependency, which sets in front of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas. The 17-foot bronze monument depicts a jumping Tarpon, the gamefish most closely-associated with Port A, onto which an ascending display of marine life is attached, including seabirds, crustaceans, sea turtles, smaller fish species, a stingray, an Atlantic Dolphin, and even mi-croscopic organisms, all sculpted by Kent Ullberg to scientifically-derived, an-atomical accuracya high standard met to impress career marine scientists.These days, the Ullbergs split their time between North Padre Island and Col-orado, and Kents energy and ambition are still boundless, as he seeks the next great challenge as the Master of Monuments.TheCoastalBend.com THE COASTAL BEND GUIDE47'