32 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 TheCoastalBend.com The Master of Monuments Kent Ullberg emigrated to the United States from Sweden four decades ago, by way of Botswana, eventually settling on Padre Island where he and his wife Veerle raised a family as Kent focused his energy on his career as a sculptor. While a number of Ullberg’s most acclaimed monuments were installed in and around Corpus Christi, his name was rapidly circulating American and European artistic societies, as he built a reputation as the world’s most accomplished real-life, wildlife sculptor. Now age 73, two years after the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his graduation from the Swedish University College of Art, Kent Ullberg’s career as an artist will be chronicled in an exhibit of some 60 pieces at the Art Museum of South Texas. “Sailfish in Three Stages of Ascending”welcomes visitors to the Boward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At 35-feet, it is the largest wildlife monument in the state. Left to Right— Ullberg in his island studio; ”Line Dance”tribute to offshore sportfishing;“Omega-3”aka theYellowfinTuna; 19-foot“Snowmastodon”at the Denver Nature & Science Museum. G rundsund, Sweden is as classic a Scandi- navian fishing village as one could envi- sion, located on the southwestern coast of Sweden directly across from Skagen, the northernmost city in Denmark. The weather is cold, except for two months or so in the middle of summer, and the wildly diverse populations of fish, seabirds and other marine life make it one of the most interesting coastal ecosystems in Eu- rope. Kent Ullberg was born in Grundsund in 1945, his father a fisherman and classic artist, and his mother a waitress and aspiring sculptor. Shortly after Kent’s birth, the Ullberg’s relocated to Gothenburg, a major port city located about 50 miles south, and where Kent would be exposed to a classic art education. Roger Tory Peterson was an American ornitholo- gist, artist and one of the founders of America’s envi- ronmental conservation movement of the 20th Cen- tury—he was also the son of Swedish immigrants who settled in Jamestown, New York. His series of field guides to birds and wildflowers were brilliantly and meticulously produced, works of art and science that served to educated its readers, and to inspire young scientists and artists like Kent Ullberg. Peterson’s A Field Guide to Birds of Britain and Eu- rope, along with the support of his parents, inspired Ullberg to pursue a formal art education in Stockholm. His decision to take a fishing boat deckhand job the summer after he graduated high school, which took him from the North Sea to South America, exposed Kent to the wide, open ocean far from the cozy, coast- al confines of the Swedish coast along the Straits of Denmark. Along his months-long fishing journey in the Atlantic, Ullberg’s saw and experienced sealife in varieties about which had only read, and became en- amored with individual, anatomical details of marine