THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 33 TheCoastalBend.com Kent Ullberg photographed in front of his Kemp’s Ridley monument at Ullberg Park on North Padre Island. (2007) “Interdependency”sets at the entrance to the University ofTexas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, and depicts in precise, scientific detail, ascending levels of marine life attached to a jumping Tarpon, the town’s historic namesake and Port A school district mascot. “Bright Blue”depicts a Blue Marlin, the most popular game fish, as it breaks the water’s surface, ready to fight. fish, mammals and seabirds, which he would first record through sketches, and later in clay in the stu- dios of the Swedish Konstfack School of Art. While Ullberg found his eventual passion and profession in art school, he was also confronted with cynicism and discouragement from his professor, who told him that his real-life approach to art was not the avant guard of the day, the 1960’s when European and American art influences were almost entirely political—perhaps ap- propriately so—and abstract was the only marketable genre in the art world, regardless of subject matter. While his professor’s sycophancy to the artistic fad of the era did succeed in deterring Ullberg from a career as a fine artist, it did not detract him from his passion for nature and his desire to apply his talents to wildlife subjects—he just had to find a way to earn a living doing it. Taxidermy is, in fact, sculpture. When anyone sees a “stuffed” bear, for example, they should know there are no actual bear parts inside the thing. It is a skin stretched over a sculpture of a bear, or a big fish, or a wildcat, mule hair deer, or what have you. The chief taxidermist at the Swedish National Museum of Art in Stockholm was one Björn Wenne- rberg, who hired Kent Ullberg as a taxidermist assis- tant following his graduation from art school—it was his first position in his first career before becoming a working artist (one who is not a starving artist), that in museum curation, and the one that would lead him to the places that would motivate and enable his now- storied career as a working artist. After his time in Stockholm, Ullberg was able to advance his education and skills in the museum world in Germany, where he was introduced to representa- tives of President Seretse Khama of Botswana who was building the country’s first national museum. A large nation geographically, Botswana has a small population of about two million today, and less than a million in the early 1970’s when Ullberg was hired to curate the new museum’s entire first collection. The nation, which is 70% desert, located directly north of South Africa, had been granted independence from Britain less than a decade prior and was the African continent’s first democratic republic. During his time in Africa, Ullberg became an expert on native wild- life, leading tours and safaris and even hunting down a rogue lioness that had killed multiple villagers.