A group of local artists will interpret their recreation of the fabled Eureka Baby from May 17 through July 29 at the Eureka Springs Historical Museum.
The “Recreating the Eureka Baby” exhibit will kick off with an opening reception at 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 17, at the museum.
In October 1880, a young man was digging a well in Eureka Springs when his pickaxe struck something odd — a 26-inch figure of a child, carved from solid stone and weighing 85 pounds. Locals speculated that it was a petrified human child, and it quickly earned the nickname “The Eureka Baby.” The item was exhibited locally, with spectators paying 10 cents each to view it. As word spread through newspapers across the country, the proprietors of the object traveled to Washington, D.C., where they intended to have the object examined by the Smithsonian. The results of this meeting, if it ever occurred, have not been publicly released. Headlines at the time poked fun and offered mixed insights as to the origins of the unique figure — from Hindu idol, to the child of the Cardiff Giant or an ancient Indian child that had been “rocked to death.”
Four years after its discovery, talk of the Eureka Baby subsided and the once astounding scientific discovery had been mostly forgotten. Then in February 1948, nearly 70 years after its initial discovery, a Clarksville man named T.J. Rowbotham revealed to the Arkansas Democrat that the baby was in fact a hoax — a marble infant carved by a local stone sculptor and secretly buried at the well-digging site. Nobody knows what became of the Eureka Baby. It has been suggested that it ended up in a museum in Chicago, but the Eureka Springs Historical Museum’s efforts to locate it have been unsuccessful thus far.
“Here at the Eureka Springs Historical Museum, we believe that the art and the history of our community are intertwined, and we enjoyed researching this fun story that combines freak-show entrepreneurialism with Eureka’s first recorded instance of guerrilla art,” the museum said in a news release about the exhibit. “Long before the city of Eureka Springs became known as a destination for arts and culture, the story of the Eureka Baby had spread far and wide across the country. In fact, the city was only a year old. Because we haven’t been able to locate the original sculpture, the only visual reference we have is a black and white photograph. We wondered what it would take to create a replica, and what Eureka’s current artists would think about this quirky tale. Once we found a way to replicate the Eureka Baby with a clay rendition, silicone mold, and plaster, we decided that it would be a fun project to create multiple Eureka Baby replicas and ask local artists to present their own interpretation by painting and/ or modifying them.”
This exhibit was designed to dovetail into the Eureka Springs May Festival of the Arts experience. Ten local artists have been invited to share their own vision of what the Eureka Baby statue would look like to them. Each artists starts out with the same object – a plain white plaster cast of the Eureka Baby statue replica. Some will then be painted, while others may be covered in texture, heavily modified or perhaps completely re-imagined. The artists were given creative freedom to make the Eureka Baby their own using the medium(s) of their choice. Participating artists include Rigdon Irvin, Janalee Robison, Robin Bray, Christopher Fischer, Samuel Asmus, Kelli Ladwig, Larry Jones, Hilka West-Irvin, Jeff Danos and Edward C. Robison III.
At the end of the exhibit run, the museum will host a fundraiser auction to sell each replica, with proceeds split evenly between artist and the museum.
The Eureka Springs Historical Museum is located at 95 S. Main St., directly across from the Cathouse. Admission is $5 per person, or free for museum members (an annual museum membership starts at only $25 per year).
