Iowa State Fair Craft Takes the Spotlight in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery

[MARY SAVIG] I grew up going to the Minnesota State Fair. About six years ago now, when I
was thinking of new projects that I could bring to the museum that really expanded how people
thought of craft in the United States, I thought of going to see butter sculptures at the Minnesota
State Fair. And so I pitched that as an exhibition. And six years later, here we are. The hardest
part was, okay, now what do we put in it? Because you can't just, you can't really Google state
fair craft. We had to go to fairs. When I went to state fairs, including the Iowa State Fair, I saw
craft everywhere. And for me, that is defined by things that are made with skill and by hand, and
also really emphasize ideas of process and memory. Fairgrounds are able to offer this really
unique lens on American art.

[MARY SAVIG] This is an example from the miniature competition at the Iowa State Fair, which
was a very delightful surprise for me. It was one of my favorite unique competitions I came
across during my state fair research. Someone who has earned a lot of accolades in the
miniature competitive categories is Beth Grabau. She recreated this really amazing scene of her
memory of her grandmother's pump house.

[MARY SAVIG] As a fellow Midwesterner, one of my favorite conversation topics is the weather.
When I went to the 2023 State Fair and I saw this temperature quilt, I knew we had to have it in
the show. I loved the storytelling of this. The artist, Debra Wykert, documented the weather for
an entire year.

[MARY SAVIG] This amazing pyramid of canned foods is an homage to a lot of the canning and
produce displays at state fairs. Historically, these were really elaborate displays that were really
meant to promote the abundance of agriculture in the United States. We worked with an Iowa
canner named Rod Zeitler. For Rod especially, things like color and composition are important.
And the biggest question I get on tours is what is in the fluorescent green jars? And that is Rod's
award winning mint jelly.

[MARY SAVIG] We knew there was going to be a butter sculpture, and almost as soon as I
started talking to Sarah Pratt about the project and visiting her at the Iowa State Fair, we knew it
was going to be a cow.

[MARY SAVIG] Learning more from Sarah about Norma Duffy Lyon and how then Norma
passed her butter knife to Sarah, I think that story is exactly what we were trying to do for this
exhibition was to center these amazing stories. And then now Sarah is mentoring her two
daughters, Hannah and Grace. Also, the cow is an icon. Everybody recognizes a giant butter
cow. We knew that would be a hook for the entire show.

[SARAH PRATT] I thought perhaps they would borrow some of my tools that I inherited from
Norma, or maybe some of my research. And we just were in this conversation and I was getting
really confused. The question that finally dawned on me was, how are we going to get this cow
to DC? And I was, I'm sorry, what? I was all on board immediately, but surprised in the best way
possible. We ended up not taking the Iowa State Fair butter cow there, but instead sculpting one
on site. The practice of sculpting butter is like second hand to me almost at this point. I started
training when I was 14, so it feels very familiar. But working within a museum setting was very
different.

[MARY SAVIG] How hard can this be? We're going to build a refrigerated case and then you put
the cow in the case. It was a lot more complicated than that. We had to do a lot of problem
solving. We are in a historic building, so we also had to think about how much weight the floor
could have, where the electricity was coming from, how much noise there would be. The
logistics that I had to help figure out were how to bring 800 pounds of butter to Washington, DC.
That is what I lost sleep over.

[SARAH PRATT] Another process that was new for me was having a sculpture up for a long
time. Most of my sculptures are like two weeks max. We worked a lot on how would we maintain
it? What would we have in place for a maintenance plan?

[SARAH PRATT] Maybe there's some spots on the back of the udder, but it's like right on the
edge of that shadow.

[LEAH BRIGHT] I was an observer and a fan of the sculpture, and about 3 months, 3 or 4
months after it was completed, we started to notice some little dark spots appearing all over the
surface. That's when I really jumped in, in a bigger role in the project.

[SARAH PRATT] When they called and said that there were some spots developing, even
though we anticipated it, even though it lasted longer than we maybe thought it might before it
needed touch ups, I still had that little feeling like, oh, shoot, like I messed up or something.
Even though it's part of the plan. And the feedback I got was, no, this is amazing. This is really
interesting. We point out when we're giving tours, we point out where the color is changing. It's
the patina of this material. And we're fascinated by how this material ages. And it made me see
it in a different light. You don't have to feel like you failed. That's just the process of learning and
developing and taking risks and trying new things.

[LEAH BRIGHT] The Butter Cow is such a perfect representation of the entire exhibition. As
conservators, we are preserving the material components of artwork, but also are really
passionate about preserving the stories and the histories behind them. Butter sculpture has
such a fascinating and rich history.

[SARAH PRATT] We, as Iowans and many other states that have this tradition, hold it very near
and dear. I just didn't know how it would be received in D.C. like if people would be confused or
they'd be excited. And it is just a warm welcome. It's been really fun.

[MARY SAVIG] Since the show has been open, one of my favorite things to do is to stand in that
gallery and have people discover the cow. They're expecting a cow, but when they see the tail,
when they see the veins on the udder, when they see how soulful the eyes are, they're really
floored that this has so much character and so much detail. That was really exciting to me, to be
able to prove to people that this is really remarkable.

[MARY SAVIG] It's all I've talked about for the last six years to anybody who will listen, how
great these fairs are and what I'm learning from them. It's honestly just been a highlight of my
career, if not my entire life. I never got to be a dairy queen, so I think this has been my sort of
like backup plan. If I couldn't be a dairy queen, it was to curate this show.