Pioneer Woman

Pioneer Woman portrays a bonneted White mother striding forward, with a Bible in one hand and her child's hand clasped in the other. This sculpture is a small-scale model of a seventeen-foot-tall monument in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

In 1926, Bryant Baker won a national competition to create a sculpture that commemorates the forty-first anniversary of Oklahoma's land run, when settlers of European descent claimed vast swaths of Indigenous land. As the woman's Bible underscores, this monument celebrates Manifest Destiny, the belief that the land now known as the United States was ordained by God to belong to White Christians.

Label text from The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture November 8, 2024 -- September 14, 2025

In 1926, Bryant Baker won a competition to sculpt a seventeen-foot-high bronze monument in Ponca City, Oklahoma. He crafted this smaller version of Pioneer Woman before unveiling the monument on April 22, 1930, to a crowd that included President Herbert Hoover, humorist Will Rogers, and oil magnate E. W. Marland, who had funded the project. The monument's plaque stated that Baker created it "in appreciation of the heroic character of the women who braved the dangers and endured the hardships incident to the daily life of the pioneer and homesteader in this country." According to the sculptor, the boy personifies the future of the American West and the woman's bundle symbolizes the burden of life. The book under her right arm is the Bible, which Baker believed was "a vital factor in building up this country" ("Bryant Baker, Sculptor, Dies; Executed Busts of 5 Presidents," New York Times, March 31, 1970).

"It is undoubtedly one of the most insouciant, sincere and human plastic presentations of the century." Kineton Parkes, quoted in "An Anglo-American Sculptor," Apollo: A Journal of the Arts, October 1932