who was peter bevis?

ARTIST + COMMUNITARIAN

Peter Willie Bevis (1953-2022) was an American sculptor living in the Northwest noted for his confrontational bronze castings of road and oil spill kills of birds and animals.

Bevis was the founder of the self-built, artist-centric Fremont Fine Arts Foundry/Gallery 154 where the popular statues of Lenin and Jimi Hendrix were cast and/or assembled. Experimental performances and gallery shows at the Foundry were always focused on social and environmental issues, such as an exhibit where Bevis built a somewhat-terrifying, fake nuclear reactor. Active in the art community, Bevis served on the jury of the Fremont Arts Council that chose the iconic "Fremont Troll" for installation under the Aurora Bridge He attained civic hero status in 1998 for his multi-year quest to return the iconic Art Deco ferry, MV Kalakala from Alaska back to its homeport of Seattle WA.
 

After the Kalakala's celebratory docking in Seattle, Mayor Greg Nichols named June 16th "Peter Bevis Day."  And, in 2019, Bevis was nominated one of Seattle most influential citizens during the first 150 years of the city's history.

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DEATH IN THE FAST LANE

In the early 19th century, John James Audubon illustrated “Birds of America,” first by killing his models, then propping them into naturalistic poses with wires, then painting iconic watercolors of each species in carefully observed natural habitats. 

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In contradistinction, in the late 20th century, Peter Bevis created “Collateral Damage,” highly-detailed bronze sculptures documenting America’s birds and animals killed by cars and trains or suffocated in oil spills. Bevis’ sculptures commemorate Nature’s victims of modern life. “I make the sculptures that need to be made," he said. "Art has become a commodity, something bought and sold. It should be something that holds you in aesthetic arrest and takes you somewhere you haven't been."

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Bevis was on a mission to create gut-wrenching art that highlighted the dark side of our love affair with the car--killer of innocent wildlife and fouler of marine habitats. His  sculptures have been called “visionary and weird"-- his "Roadkill" bronzes of dead dogs, cats, rabbits, coyotes and even a moose were cast in his foundry in Fremont, an artist-enclave in the NW corner of Seattle. To produce his "Spill Kill" artworks, Bevis traveled to the coast of Ireland, to Valdez Alaska and to Neah Bay to cast seabirds and mammals drowned in petroleum slicks. 

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TREE OF LIFE

During his lifetime, Bevis never realized his long-time dream of creating a "living" public artwork consisting of a bronze casting of a massive old-growth redcedar stump (biggest recorded at 19' dia.) and planting the hollow center with a cedar sapling that would spend its next 600 years "growing up." He loved the idea of a community tending to its botanical ward, generation after generation. He even located his "model' on a farm near the small city of North Bend, WA where he hoped to install his artwork.

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Peter Bevis died in San Diego on July 12, 2022 and was buried in Peshastin, the small town in Eastern Washington where he was born.