THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 35 TheCoastalBend.com Ullberg’s monument to Jesus Christ,“It is I,” which is installed in front of the First United Methodist Church on the Corpus Christi Bayfront, was a rare departure from wildlife for the famed real-life sculptor. Below Left to Right—”Deinonychus”(terrible claw) was the world’s first bronze monument of a dinosaur when it was installed at the Logan Square entrance to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, in 1987; “Waiting for Sockeye,”monument depicting a grizzly bear hunting salmon, installed at the National Mueum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. line Blvd., where you will find one of Ullberg’s rare sculptures of a human figure, that of Jesus Christ (“It is I,” 1995), which soars 25 1/2 feet in front of the First United Methodist Church. Ull- berg’s famed See Otters are seen by millions at the entrance to the Texas State Aquarium, where several of his works have been installed, and his 24-foot “Leaping Marlin” welcomes residents and visitors to his own home community on North Pa- dre Island. One of Ullberg’s most celebrated artistic ac- complishments was also a much-celebrated ac- complishment in science, his bronze monument “Deinonychus,” translated “Terrible Claw,” based entirely on a fossilized dinosaur skeleton that was well more than 100 million years old. Placed above the Logan Square entrance to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, it was the first known bronze sculpture of a dinosaur to be installed anywhere in the world, in 1987. By 1990, Kent Ullberg had climbed to the top of the North American art world, being paid well to do what he loved and recognized by his peers for the prolific excellence and consistently high quality of his work—he was elected a full Acade- mician by the National Academy of Art in New York, and he had even formed a close bond and personal friendship with his childhood inspira- tion, Robert Tory Peterson, the birding artist and conservationist, who visited the Ullberg’s at their home in Corpus Christi. Kent Ullberg openly and warmly proclaims his debt of gratitude to the United States, where he is a naturalized citizen, and which he says of- fered the freedom and commercial opportunities that enabled him to live his dream as a working artist. Much of his early work was done at his home studio on Padre Island, but a number of years ago Ullberg built a spanning studio complex in Loveland, Colorado, close to his first adopted home in America, and to the foundries where his final monuments are completed. By the mid-1990’s, with a near-endless wait- ing list of private and commissioned work, and the studio of his wildest dreams, Kent Ullberg’s career set upon a trek of one historical accomplishment after another, taking his talent and work disci- pline to places of which he had never dreamt. U llberg’s selection of projects over the second half of his artistic ca- reer have been those that have of- fered opportunities to reach new benchmarks in the world of real- life monumental sculpture. The giant, 21-foot bronze monument, “Fighting Bull,” sets atop the football stadium at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ullberg installed a life-sized monument of an African