Bob Johnson Made It Bigger

During a career that stretched out over 60 years, Robbinsdale sculptor, Bob Johnson created hundreds of memorable outdoor sculptures. Johnson grew up in Becker, Minnesota, and served in the Navy during World War II. He studied sculpture with Evelyn Raymond and attended classes at the Walker Art Center. Some of  Johnson’s earliest works included floats for Miami’s Orange Bowl Parade and a paper-mache recreation of the Taj Mahal for for Al Sheehan’s Aqua Follies. Johnson found a market for his sculpture by creating fiberglass  objects for Naegele Outdoor Advertising. Among his many memorable works were a  “Sandy Saver” to promote Gold Bond stamps, the Sno Boy and eight green octopuses perched on poles above Colonial Car Wash locations.

Johnson is probably best remembered for the giant Golden Guernsey cows that appeared on Ewald Dairy  billboards across the Twin Cities. The enormous 3-D cow heads were 10 feet high with horns that measured12 feet from tip to tip. In order to build Guernseys out of the elements, construction was completed in an aircraft hangar. The first set went up across the street the Ewald building on Golden Valley Road in 1954. The design reappeared on billboards in downtown Minneapolis and along highways in the western suburbs. After the Ewald Brothers Dairy closed in 1982, the original Golden Guernseys were moved to the Minnesota State Fair. Another pair graces the outside of Grandma’s Saloon in Duluth.

Johnson art works were a recognizable part of the Twin Cities landscape for decades. In addition to Ewald’s Dairy Cows, most of us still remember The big tree that adorned the Midwest Savings building in downtown Minneapolis, the 10 foot bronze Atlas outside the Brookdale Health Spa, Chef Thunderbird on horseback at the Thunderbird Motel in Bloomington, the giant eagle that on the Minnesota Federal Savings building in downtown St. Paul and the scale train and locomotive at Crystal’s Ironhorse bar.

Later in his career Johnson specialized in duplicating objects found in nature. His  deer antlers and buffalo skulls, stumps and  boulders led to work creating 48-foot steel and fiberglass Douglas Fir replicas for Disney World. Johnson’s works often appeared in far flung places. In Detroit he created an enormous 40-foot Stroh’s beer bottle, for the Grand Pacific Hotel in Bismarck North Dakota Johnson completed a 12-foot long 5-ffot high pioneer scene in bas-relief, a towering sign above a Milwaukee Cantonese cocktail lounge featured one  Johnson’s  6-foot tall fiberglass Peacocks.

Johnson continued his work long after the age when most men retire. His designs for home and yard decorations were picked up by Bachmans and Gabberts.  Johnson often said he did not consider himself to be a fine artist and called his work imagineering. He was self-depricating about his art and told one reporter he should have been an assistant to a great artist. Despite regular jobs and some acclaim, the hours for a free lance commercial sculptor were long and the pay was low. Johnson was forty years old before he was  afford the small house in Robbinsdale where lived and worked for over fifty years. At the Age of 90 he was still creating and displaying smaller works a the Robbin Gallery and the Wunderkammer store on West Broadway. Johnson passed away in 2014, but his amazing three dimensional works will be remembered for generations.