Mcallister Deer gone, but teen’s sculpture not forgotten
A middle school art project completed during the pandemic became, for a short while, the belle of Mcallister Park and a social media sensation.
Now it is just a jumbled pile of rotting wood and screws, gone but not forgotten. At least a few of the work’s fans hope to memorialize the piece in some way.
The sculpture was a surprisingly delicate rendering of a deer crafted by 13-year-old artist Elizabeth Gutierrez from scraps of deadwood she and her brother William, 8, collected in the park.
Upright and alert as if surveying its surroundings for danger, the Mcallister Deer stood proudly for about a month and a half, according to Gutierrez’s father, Chris, until it eventually was destroyed — by nature or man, no one knows for sure.
“I felt a little bad when I saw it had been destroyed,” said Elizabeth, who attends the Design and Technology Academy at Ed White Middle School and made the deer as an assignment from Stacey Morrison, her art teacher.
Morrison said she gave her students the assignment in early May, “after what I call the Spring Break That Never Ended.”
“I had a classroom full of art supplies,” she said, “but no way to get it to them. So I told them to create something from what
ever materials they had on hand.”
Since the family spends a lot of time in the park, they decided to make a sculpture with deadfall.
When they happened upon a piece that looked much like a set of buckhorns, the decision to sculpt a deer was made.
“Besides, a deer deserves to be in the park,” said Elizabeth, who wants to be a digital artist when she grows up.
With each piece they found, Elizabeth and William would tell their dad where they thought it fit on the sculpture and he’d screw it into place, overlapping one piece with another.
Morrison said that as long as her students made an effort to complete the piece, they’d earn a 100 on the assignment.
“But Elizabeth really blew it out of the park with her deer,” she said.
It took the siblings and their dad about a day and a half to complete the sculpture. Several parkgoers watched as they worked, but it wasn’t until they left the deer standing near where Blue Loop Trail crosses Mud Creek that the Mcallister Deer went viral.
After several bikers posted photos of the deer online, the image was shared by the neighborhood Nextdoor group and on the Friends of Mcallister Park Facebook page, Chris Gutierrez said.
“Thank you to the artist who built this beautiful deer out of wood from the creek!” read the Facebook post, which garnered 129 likes and other responses.
“I thought it was breathtaking,” said Laura Matthews, a board member of Friends of Mcallister Park. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It warmed your heart and took your mind off of everything that’s been going on.”
As beautiful as the sculpture was, most of the wood used to build the deer was soft and partially rotted. So whether it was the weather or folks up to no good, fans soon began reporting that the deer was in trouble.
Soon after it was completed, a storm hit, with the wind and rain endangering the sculpture.
“I ride my bike through here regularly and I could see how, little by little, it was falling apart,” said Zelenia Alvarez, Elizabeth and William’s mother.
The sculpture toppled, or was knocked over, at least once, and another time the head fell off. But whenever there was a problem, someone would step in with a fix. The head was reattached by an unknown good Samaritan. When Chris Guttierez visited once, he noticed that several pieces had been repaired with different screws than those he’d used.
Matthews said she doubts that vandals damaged the statue — “We don’t have problem with people vandalizing the park.” She suspects the weather eventually took its toll on the deer.
Elizabeth said she wasn’t surprised the deer fell apart because the wood they used was rotting.
“But I have lots of pictures of it,” she said.
Some of the deer’s fans are attempting to memorialize it with a plaque. A spokesman for the Parks and Recreation Department said installing a permanent marker would require many levels of city approval. But the plaque that’s been made, consisting of heavy mat board paper mounted on a piece of wood, wouldn’t last long outdoors.
“Maybe we can have it
displayed in the local library,” said Mary Ahrens, who frequents the park and has spearheaded the effort. She said she was disappointed that the much-loved sculpture is no longer in the park. “I want the artists to have something special to remember
it by.”
Not that those who saw it will ever forget the McAllister Deer.