Pioneer Plaza longhorn sculptures
— a cattle drive cast in bronze, still moving.
Not only on a wall.
Pioneer Plaza longhorn sculptures, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Forty-nine bronze longhorns and three trail-driving cowboys cross a sloped park beside the Dallas Convention Center, an oversized monument to the Shawnee Trail that once ran cattle north out of Texas. The sculptor Robert Summers worked from his Glen Rose studio for most of a decade. The cattle move down an artificial creek bed, past native grasses and a low limestone cliff. It is the kind of public art a city makes when it wants to remember out loud.
The place, in three passes.
Pioneer Plaza occupies 4.2 acres in the Convention Center District of downtown Dallas, at the corner of Young and Griffin Streets. The plaza was dedicated in 1994 to commemorate the nineteenth-century cattle drives that crossed this part of North Texas. It sits next to the Pioneer Park Cemetery, one of the oldest burial grounds in the city, with graves dating to the 1850s. Admission is free, and the plaza is open to the public daily.
The sculptor Robert Summers of Glen Rose, Texas, cast the original 40 longhorns and three mounted cowboys in bronze between 1992 and 1995; additional cattle were added later, bringing the herd to 49. Each steer stands a little larger than life and was modelled from living animals at Texas ranches. The plaza is landscaped with native bluestem and live oak around an artificial creek bed and a low limestone bluff that mimics the Cross Timbers escarpment.
The plaza is open 24 hours and is free to enter. It sits across from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, three blocks south of the Dallas County Courthouse, and a five-minute walk from the Convention Center DART light-rail station. The walking path threads between the cattle and crosses the creek bed twice, so the sculpture is meant to be moved through rather than viewed from a distance. The adjacent Pioneer Park Cemetery is also open to the public.
