Dallas’ founding tale is remembered with bronze bull statues at Pioneer Plaza, a top attraction in the city.
The location, in front of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, showcases impressive art that offers a snapshot of the area's appearance in 1841. The statues, erected created in the mid-1990s, honor Dallas’ founders: cattle drivers who traveled through the region on the Shawnee Trail in the mid-19th century.
The pieces, created by artist Rober Summers of Glen Rose, Texas, celebrate the cowboy culture that endures in Texas. The plaza where the installation resides is the largest public space in the city’s Central Business District, an ironic yet fitting location for the dozens of bronze longhorn steers guided by cowboys on horseback.
Notably, the bronze trio of cowboys showcases the diversity of cowboy culture.
“There are three cowboys on horseback. There’s an African American, an Anglo trail boss, and a Hispanic Vaquero … And if you look at the Anglo cutter on the very top … he is supposed to remind us of Rodin’s Thinker in Paris. He is sending us all the way back to the 19th century, and his pose is the same on horseback. It’s kind of a play on art history,” said Lynn Rushton-Reed, the Dallas Public Art Program manager for the Office of Arts and Culture, to KERA News.
The bronze statues are famous for their lifelike appearance, with with no two longhorns being identical. One visitor described the site as “a must-see.”
“This is a sight which I feel you must see in reality, it’s breathtaking with the detail which has been carved into every animal,” wrote Ossie from the UK, per Tripadvisor.
