The story of Kirby Scudder’s cow art is the story of the Tannery
Driving down Highway 9 through Harvey West, you might find it surprising to spot a cow in the middle of a construction zone.
What’s more surprising is that it’s holding a Macbook Pro. Oh, and it’s 20 feet tall, wearing green overalls, and standing upright.
Two legs sprout out from either side of the papier-mâché behemoth’s head—remnants of a smaller cow that rested for a few weeks on the lower cow’s shoulders before being pushed off by 70-mile-per-hour December winds.
To the surviving cow’s right is a metal storage locker. To its left are the Tannery’s housing lofts. Scattered around its hooves are cherry pickers and giant concrete building blocks.
The dilapidated art piece, which was designed by Santa Cruz artist Kirby Scudder, stands at the middle of the Tannery Arts Center, an 8.3-acre complex that gives creative minds a local spot to work, live, perform and hang out. Directly in the cow’s line of vision is the historic Hide House, a maroon building that dates back to the site’s leather-tanning days and will someday soon be the site of the Tannery’s Colligan Theater—hence all the construction.
In some ways, the story of the cow is the story of the Tannery. It’s also the story of how Scudder acquired more cow knick-knacks, hats, and stuffed toys than he ever could have wanted.
Marking the Spot
“I did these cows to help these people out, and it caught on like brushfire,” Scudder explains as he sits at a table in the Tannery’s Art Bar and Café. He’s sipping a White Russian out of a plastic thermos—his drink of choice, for the caffeine. An 8-foot-tall papier-mâché cow head is mounted on the wall behind his head, a docile look in its eyes.
“I was asked to do all this stuff,” he says, “and before I know it, everybody associates me with the cows.”
It all started when Scudder, a native of Manhattan, moved to Santa Cruz in 2003. Soon he and his new friend Chip, a budding art maven, started getting creative about searching for gallery space. Together, they created First Friday and the Santa Cruz Institute of Contemporary Art. “We were just trying to figure out what worked for Santa Cruz and how to really engage the community in the arts here,” says Chip, now the executive director for the Downtown Association.
At the time, Ceil Cirillo, the city’s redevelopment director, was talking about renovating the Salz Tannery, which had shut down its leather tanning operation two years prior, and bringing it into the 20th century as an 8.3-acre arts complex with housing, studios and performance spaces.
“I just thought it was a great idea for any place, and the vision was very broad,” says Scudder, who now lives at the Tannery. “It was really a full-blown arts campus. At the very core of it was housing for artists, which was a much-needed thing around the county, and I’ve come to realize how important of a thing it is for Santa Cruz, to have working studios. But what we had was an abandoned property. Not knowing anything about Santa Cruz, I assumed if I thought it was a good idea, everybody thought it was a good idea. I quickly learned that most of the community hated the idea.”
In one public meeting after another, Scudder heard Santa Cruzans slam the Tannery project. For starters, the project appeared to be in a flood plain. Second were concerns about the cost, even though it would be covered by fundraising and the city’s redevelopment funds. Also, many people wanted a big-box store to go in the site, arguing that it would improve the city’s tax base.
Perhaps the main question about the project, though, was “Why are you doing all this for artists?” Cirillo remembers people saying that Santa Cruz should instead provide housing for teachers, police officers and any other number of given professions.
“There are teachers who are living in the Tannery,” she says, looking back now. “Art teachers need housing, too.”
Part of the problem was that a project seeking to harness so much of the town’s creativity lacked much of an artistic identity at all. Scudder, who was living at the time in the Tannery as its caretaker, had an idea—although, granted, the epiphany sounds silly in hindsight: what if he built 12 giant papier-mâché cows?
Scudder, who has a background in marketing, went to the Tannery’s advisory board armed with the suggestion and five images of giant cows Photoshopped in front of the Tannery.
“They immediately said yes. I don’t think they knew how crazy I was,” Scudder says.
Within weeks, rubbernecking drivers were driving by on Highway 9 perplexed. These enormous animals had shown up out of nowhere, some of which peered over the fence as if grazing.
“When Kirby started making cows, it lightened things up,” says George Newell, former executive director of the Tannery. “How can you get upset at a 15-foot cow?”
“They got so much interest, because they were really cool,” remembers Emily Reilly, then a city councilmember, who helped with the cows. “They were big, but they really looked like cows.”
Scudder started each cow by crafting a wooden frame, which he wrapped with industrial-strength cardboard he picked up for free. Then he’d cover that with newspaper and Elmer’s carpenter’s glue.
The irony, Scudder notes, is that while the Salz Tannery was a leather operation, there’s no record of a cow ever actually being on the property. And, of course, he was building 30-foot-long dairy cows—not the kind of cattle anyone would use for their hides.
That first dozen of giant papier-mâché cows would not be Scudder’s last, and the loft apartments, which comprised phase one of the Tannery project, opened in 2009. As artists began moving into the new lofts, cow gifts started pouring in to Scudder, and people were telling him every story or fun fact they knew about the animals. One man even invited Scudder out to his cattle ranch in Mariposa three hours away, insisting it would help with his artwork.
It didn’t.
“I don’t even care about cows. I mean, I like cows, but it’s not like I think about them,” Scudder says. “In my apartment now, people have given me cow hats, cow stuffed toys, everything cow you can imagine. If my parents were alive, they’d go, ‘Kirby, what’s up with the cows?’ I just did a project.”
Campus Trip
Ann Hazels is sitting in the Radius Gallery—the Tannery’s only operating gallery, which she owns and operates. The current show is “Marking Space and Time,” which features environmental pieces—a prayer rug made out of a dried-up lake bed, and art made out of salvaged old-growth redwood. She says buzz around the campus has not yet peaked.
“The Tannery is still in its early years, not as far as buildings, but as far as creativity. It’s on people’s radar. It’s still getting discovered,” says Hazels, who happens to be wearing earrings made out of cow bones. “Creatively speaking, it’s very diverse. It’s all different things going on. I think that’s the beauty of the beast. It’s an art work patchworked of everyone’s work put together.”
The Radius Gallery is in the artist studio section, which was part of the Tannery’s second phase, completed in the summer of 2012.
Phase three will be the performing arts center, which is slated to open this fall. Fundraising is more than 95 percent complete for the $6 million center, which will be named after philanthropist Bud Colligan, and will include a 200-seat-theater, as well as a new home for the Santa Cruz Ballet Theater company.
Speaking of dance, the Tannery just got a big boost this year when Cat Willis, founder of the Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center, won a Gail Rich Award for her teaching. It’s all part of the arts complex’s rising profile.
For his part, Scudder is changing things up, too, with a cardboard-based art show at his loft on Feb. 6 for First Friday.
After talking with me at the Art Bar, Scudder decided to bring me by to his loft to show me his work and to refill his thermos with Kahlúa, vodka and ice cubes. His cow memorabilia is hidden out of sight.
The new paintings are rough around the edges and three-dimensional, with pieces of cardboard jutting off the wall. One is a painting of cacti on Mission Street; another is of an upside-down Peet’s Coffee cup spilling all over an art gallery.
“You can do anything you want with it. There is no right or wrong,” he says of his cardboard medium. “I love seeing screws and the imperfections of the whole thing, but we’ll see what people say on Friday.”
Painting on cardboard allows Scudder to hone skills he learned doing papier-mâché. And yet, because the artwork is inside, he’s able to use color in a way that he never does in sculptures. It also allows him to do something rawer than anything he could put on canvas.
“I’ve done plenty of paintings on canvas. I’m not trying to compete with that,” Scudder says. “I like the quality of the cardboard. That’s the whole point of working with it, is not to make it be something that it’s not.”
Moo Over
After Scudder’s original herd was finished and put out to pasture, he built another papier-mâché creation, by request—we’ll call him Cow Number 13—to raise money for a photographer who had been diagnosed with brain cancer.
Shortly after, Scudder began his hiatus from cattle. He did “Night Light,” a project for which he’d rather be remembered: he and volunteers pointed hundreds of powerful lights at the sky in 2006 and 2007 to promote world peace. He drew an iconic poster of “The Cruz” and other cities.
It was only a matter of time, though, before Scudder’s past with four-leggeds caught up with him. In 2012, actor Ian McRae approached Scudder and asked him to build two more cows for the opening of Rebecca’s—now the Art Bar. Scudder agreed, constructing two papier-mâché bovine heads—Cows 14 and 15—one of which hangs at the Art Bar today. He also built a 20-foot wooden cow, the Tannery’s only non-papier-mâché cow, to stand along the highway and draw attention to the café.
“So, it’s embarrassing,” Scudder admits, “because everybody in this community who knows me—they’re like, ‘You’re doing cows, aren’t you?’ I’m like, ‘Would you stop?’ They’re like, ‘Come on, you’re doing cows.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing cows.’”
Then last spring, Scudder finally surrendered to his fate when he approached the board again and offered to do one more cow sculpture to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Tannery. It would become Cow 16, the one that is currently staring down the Hide House in the middle of a construction zone.
It was his most elaborate cow yet, built in three pieces, with each section stacked on the one below it with a forklift. The frame’s carpentry was complex and curved, with interlocking pieces to support the additional weight.
Like each papier-mâché cow before it, Scudder plastered the outer layer with issues of Good Times, which he says always had the most absorbent paper. In the middle of Cow 16’s construction, though, GT switched its paper stock to a glossier print. So, Scudder called up everyone he knew who might have an old issue or two lying around and asked them to drop theirs off.
By the time Scudder finished piecing the 30-footer together (green overalls, Macbook and all), the cow had been covered half with GT’s old paper and half with the newer—and apparently less absorbent—one. Scudder was less than thrilled about the change in paper, and the New York native doesn’t mince words about it, either.
“I don’t like your paper,” he says. “I like it for reading. It’s much clearer resolution. It’s a clearer-looking paper. But if I need to make another big sculpture, I’m fucked.”
Kirby Scudder’s studio at the Tannery will be open for First Friday from 6-9 p.m. at 1030 River St., #218. Visitkirbyscudder.com for more information.
