Texas Tech Will Rogers statue
— the cowboy still pointing west.
Not only on a wall.
Texas Tech Will Rogers statue, 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.
“A bronze cowboy on his horse Soapsuds, at the centre of Texas Tech's Memorial Circle in Lubbock. Sculpted by Electra Waggoner Biggs and unveiled in February 1950. Students wrap the statue in red crepe paper before home football games. The cowboy faces the sunset, the horse turned the other way, and the story behind that turning is half the reason people stop here.
The place, in three passes.
Will Rogers and Soapsuds stands at Memorial Circle, the geographic centre of the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock sits on the Llano Estacado, the high tableland of the South Plains, at roughly 3,200 feet of elevation. The bronze anchors the original 1925 campus layout, ringed by the Administration Building and the early Spanish Renaissance halls that gave Texas Tech its visual signature. The statue weighs about 3,200 pounds and was cast in New York before being shipped to Lubbock.
The statue was unveiled on 16 February 1950 by Amon G. Carter, the Fort Worth publisher who had been a close friend of Will Rogers and commissioned the work after Rogers' death in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska. The sculptor was Electra Waggoner Biggs of Vernon, Texas. Biggs cast a second copy, which stands in Fort Worth at the Will Rogers Memorial Center. The Texas Tech bronze is oriented so the horse's rear is turned away from campus, by long tradition.
Memorial Circle sits at the centre of the Texas Tech campus, off Broadway near University Avenue in central Lubbock, and is open at all hours with no admission. Before each home football game, students wrap the statue in red crepe paper, a tradition that began as a defence against rival vandalism and has carried on as homecoming ritual. The best light is late afternoon, when the sun pulls along the bronze from the west and the long shadow falls back across the circle.
