MATT A

Eye Pro President Sponsors Communitywide Art Project
Posted on: 06/22/2005



Eye Pro President Brenda Fishbaugh helped her hometown get on the map by sponsoring one of 102 mastodons as part of a larger-than-life community art project now on display in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“I was asked to be on the steering committee of the 40th-anniversary event for Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne,” Fishbaugh says. “We decided to use large extinct mastodons--related to the wooly mammoth--as our symbol, as most mastodon skeletons in museums around the world were excavated in Fort Wayne.”

Fishbaugh signed up to sponsor a $3,000 mastodon in honor of her former professor of anthropology at IPFW who died in December 2003. “Dr. Paul Provost was the person who interested me in international business and helped me appreciate the difference in cultures that’s helped me so much with working overseas,” she says.

Fishbaugh chose Jody Hemphill-Smith, a well-known local artist and friend of Provost, to help her capture the cultural anthropologist’s life on the mastodon.

“Mastodons on Parade” will be on display throughout the summer, and this fall they’ll either go to their permanent home or be auctioned off at a gala event, with the proceeds benefiting the local United Way.

House of Tan

I live in Fort Wayne, and the Mastodons are defiantly a sight to see. They are everywhere and all are very creative. One was sponsored by a local Harley dealer and looks like a chopper, another was transformed into an airplane, and one is coming out of a manhole with a hard-hat on.

-Tom

dcjjp2

We had the same here with the elephants, donkeys and Pandas. They are cool...

Sherin

HmmmmmmmmmmmmmSeattle chose pigs...I would have rather have seen Mastadons!
They did show cows in Vegas 2 years ago...
We took a picture of our Traveling gnome with the Elvis cow.