"On the Trail"

The artist, Victoria Reed, is an alumnus of UNI, where she received full tuition scholarships from the Art department two years in a row (an unprecedented honor). She earned the Outstanding Body of Work Award in the 2008 UNI Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition and the Merit Award in the 2009 student exhibition, and had her work featured at the Waterloo Center for the Arts while she was still a student. She graduated in 2010, but had begun creating horse sculptures in this style before her senior art show. Two such pieces from her show were for sale in Dubuque's 2010 Art on the River event for $12,500 each.

Artist's Statement: "All of my work hinges from the premise that the mind supplies detail far better than the hands, so portions of my work are merely implied with focal points of naturalistic detail. My work relies heavily on its audience to complete it. The use of animals stems from my Iowan roots which I both love and mock in equal shares. As a farm girl turned fine artist, my work talks about heritage, the aesthetics of form and the emotive qualities of its subjects. I wanted to mesh the delicacy of scroll work lace and the daydreams of a little girl together with the power, grace, and mass of the horses recalling the common dapple gray coloration and bringing to mind something reminiscent of jewelry." (City of Dubuque, 2010 Art on the River, "Dapple I and Dapple II")

Rachael Acheson
Adjunct Special Collections
& University Archives Librarian
May 2017