Vandals have stolen one of the just-installed Keeper statues celebrating Wichita’s 150th
If you go out searching for the 13 Keeper statues that were just installed as a celebration of Wichita’s 150th birthday, you can mark one off the list — for now.
Over the weekend, the new statue at Planeview Park was somehow knocked off its base and stolen. The 10-foot-tall fiberglass statue, which had been painted by artist Tereza Zardoz, had just been put in place near the park’s playground two weeks ago.
It’s the first time since the Keeper project started in 2015 that a statue has been stolen, said Tessa Brungardt, the project manager. And only one other statue has ever been vandalized.
The Keeper initiative was started by Together Wichita, a nonprofit made up of businesses that organize and finance projects intended to better the city. When it first started, the group asked Wichita artists to decorate nine replica statues of the Keeper of the Plains, the iconic sculpture by Blackbear Bosin that is stationed at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers.
Over the years, 29 statues were completed and installed in places like the Hotel at Old Town and outside the Credit Union of America in Delano.
Earlier this year, the group announced plans to donate 13 more statues that would be decorated by artists and placed in Wichita parks as a gift to the city on its 150th birthday. The artists were each paid $1,000 and asked to incorporate the number 150 or put 150 objects in their plans. The 13 new statues were put in parks all over town in the past several weeks.
Over the weekend, Wichitans Joel and Amy Schaefer took their three kids on a driving tour of the new Keepers and later e-mailed the Eagle asking about the statue in Planeview Park, which they said was not there. The Eagle alerted Brungardt, who went to take a look.
Sure enough, the statue was gone. All that remained was the bolted-down base, and from what she could tell, it looked as though the vandals had beaten the 75-pound Keeper off its pedestal before hauling it away.
The statue had to have been taken sometime between Thursday, when city workers were near the statue pouring new concrete, and Saturday evening, when the Schaefers noticed it missing, Brungardt said. Her bet is that it happened on Friday evening.
The city filed a police report, and Brungardt says that she hopes the vandals will be identified. Someone reported possibly seeing the missing Keeper in the back of a pickup truck near Botanica, she said, but there’s no proof of that so far.
“We feel terrible for the artist who put so much time and energy and passion into it,” she said.
That artist, Zardoz, found out about the incident on Sunday and shared on Facebook photos of the empty base.
A native of the neighborhood, Zardoz collaborated with Arts Partners on the statue and worked with school children from nearby Jardine Middle School to come up with her design, which had a light blue motif and highlighted the aviation heritage of the neighborhood, featuring images of the famous Joyland sign, of “Doc” the B-29 and of neighborhood buildings.
“I am at a total loss for words why someone would do something like this,” she wrote. “Especially with public art that’s in collaboration with kids from the community.”
The partners in Together Wichita want to replace the statue for the neighborhood, Brungardt said, and Zardoz has indicated she’s willing to paint another one.
But this one will be placed in a more visible area, possibly somewhere near Jardine, where students can pass by it daily and take pride in it.
She encouraged anyone who sees any suspicious activity around the remaining Keeper statues to report it to police immediately.
“But we just want to go on record and say we don’t anticipate it happening any more,” she said. “We just hope that people look at these as a source of pride and not something to be destroyed.”
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 11:09 AM.
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