Documenting the Life and Sculpture of Lee Oskar Lawrie (1877-1963)

Few Artists, living or dead, were as prolific as Lee Lawrie.

His career spanned from the Gaslight Era—

to the dawn of the Space Age.

Lee Lawrie was a titan in the world of 20th Century American Art, creating Architectural Sculpture from Coast-to-Coast; for Seven Decades.

Among his credits, he was a pioneer of American Art Deco. Yet the world barely knows who he was; or the magnitude of his contribution to 20th Century American Art.

The purpose of this site is to change all that, and to identify, discuss, show and tell of the enormous presence of uncredited of his architectural sculpture, most of which went unsigned, unrecognized and/or largely forgotten.

Unlike most artists, the majority of Lawrie’s work is public art, that cannot be physically collected and displayed in a single gallery. To see it firsthand requires great amounts of travel, and research, such as I have undertaken over the better part of the past two decades.

LeeLawrie.com is the result of nearly two decades of research, travel, photography and writing. It is a virtual museum of Lawrie’s Art, in lieu of a single exhibition.

Lee Lawrie’s Prairie Deco: History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol, 4th Edition

is the first book written exclusively about his Largest Architectural Sculpture Commission of his career, the sculpture at the Nebraska State Capitol. Its architect was Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, (1869-1924). The late architecture professor emeritus of the University of Nebraska described Goodhue to me as being “A man with one foot in the 19th Century and the other in the 20th.” He was truly a champion for the move toward moderne architecture.

Prairie Deco captures all of the sculpture he created for the Nebraska Capitol, explains its symbolism to Nebraska’s History and culture, and tells the story of Democracy itself, introduced into the region by its European settlers in the 19th Century.