Photos by Laura Moss Artist Dave McGary sits at the base of his 11-foot bronze sculpture of South Dakota Sioux warrior Rain in the Face, a historic figure from the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Dave McGary’s soul-stirring bronze sculptures document the culture of Native Americans

Sculptor Dave McGary settles his 6-foot, 5-inch frame into a chair in his Paradise Valley, Arizona, home studio, where he recounts a life as colorful as the art he creates.

McGary was raised on a cattle ranch in Cody, Wyoming, and loved to draw as a child. When just 16, he seized a rare opportunity to study the casting of bronze sculpture in Italy. Odd as it may sound, he says it was his Italian experience that led him to his primary subject matter—Native Americans.

The artist first learned about the lost-wax process of casting metal from his seventh-grade art teacher. A natural at it, McGary soon went from creating jewelry to crafting fine likenesses of horses. Word of his talent reached noted Wyoming sculptor Harry Jackson, who had created a bronze-casting apprenticeship program in Italy. Jackson chose the teen to be one of four Americans to study there. The others were in their 30s.

 “I quit high school to go to Italy,” the now 50-year-old McGary volunteers. Spending two years at a foundry, he learned about pouring and casting bronze—“the basics, centuries-old techniques—from eighth-generation craftsmen,” he notes. He also studied human anatomy, something that would later pay dividends.

McGary never did finish high school. “I just hit the ground running,” he recalls. At 18, he returned to the United States and took a job at a foundry in Santa Fe. There, he made friends with Native American students who were attending the Institute of American Indian Arts. An important turning point, he says, “It literally changed my life. It introduced me to a culture.”

Invited into their lives as a trusted friend, and experiencing their lore and ancient customs firsthand, McGary was symbolically adopted into a Lakota Sioux family and given the name Big Eagle. “The eagle is a sacred bird,” explains the sculptor. “They saw me as a messenger of truth sent to document their culture, and to teach people about them.” This Phoenix Home & Garden Master of the Southwest has been doing so through his award-winning sculpture for more than three decades.

 McGary’s highly detailed, color-tinged bronze pieces depicting historic tribal members grace many prestigious settings, among them the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. From busts as small as 6 inches to figures larger than life-size, his works are collected by Hollywood stars, statesmen and the not-so-famous alike.

McGary also has won the respect of Native Americans. “Most Indian people are spiritual people, and we recognize that in Dave and in his work,” says Wyoming resident James Trosper, a member of the Shoshone tribe. It is McGary’s sculpture of Chief Washakie, Trosper’s great-great grandfather, that sits in the permanent collection of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. McGary had won a commission from the state of Wyoming to create the piece, one of his many honors. Before he began the work, he met with Trosper and other descendants of the chief to learn what they knew about their notable relative; the artist also pored over documented archival information. “You want to find the heart and soul of the people you are portraying,” he explains.

Phoenix attorney Bill Ridenour, a fifth-generation Arizonan who collects McGary’s sculpture, praises the artist’s attention to detail. As a student of history, Ridenour says, “I like to see everything authentic and well-researched, and he does both.”

Utah collector Jim Laub, a part-time Arizona resident, recalls his first experience seeing the sculptures of American Indians in McGary’s Scottsdale gallery, Expressions in Bronze. “The bead work and the leather clothing are made of bronze, yet it took me a while to realize that they were not real beads and leather,” Laub comments.

McGary started adding color to his sculpture about 25 years ago, finding that the “shoe polish-brown patina” of bronze sculpture did not suit the Native American people he was portraying. “They were so colorful,” he says. “Their faces were painted. Their shields were painted.”

McGary, married and the father of a 13-year-old daughter, looks back on a gratifying career—one that remains in full gear. “I owe so much to the Italians and the Native Americans,” he reflects. “And I owe a lot to growing up on a ranch. It teaches you a work ethic.”