Roberta Plummer, 81, artist [modeler] with the Milwaukee Public Museum
Shrike!
By JESSE GARZA
Oct. 7, 2006
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Roberta Plummer was an artist with the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Photo/Contributed
It's been said many times that art imitates life, but it could be said
that Roberta Plummer's art imitated nature.
Roberta Plummer was an artist with the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Or, perhaps more accurately, the trees, plants and leaves she
painstakingly crafted from chicken wire, plaster and plastic for the
Milwaukee Public Museum interpreted nature.
"If it's not conspicuous, it's a good job," Plummer said in a 1967
newspaper interview.
"But, believe me, you can always tell the difference," she said.
"You can't duplicate nature."
Funeral services were Friday for Plummer, a plant modeler for the
museum for 25 years whose work included the lush greenery of the
museum's award-winning rain forest exhibit.
Plummer, who also created the tree and other botanical elements in the
museum's Streets of Old Milwaukee and European Village exhibits, died
Monday of cancer at age 81.
"She was a remarkable part of the success of the museum," said Ed
Green, the museum's former art director, who hired Plummer in 1965.
She was born Roberta Caroline Jackson on Sept. 15, 1925, in Niles,
Mich., and grew up in Waukegan, Ill. She earned a degree in art from
Ripon College, her daughter Sharon Cerny said.
She did display work for retail businesses in Fond du Lac before
marrying John Wesley Plummer in 1950. The couple then moved to
Milwaukee, where her work took on an added benefit.
"It allowed her to work at home while raising us," her daughter said.
"Our house was her studio."
Plummer did freelance work from her home on Milwaukee's north side,
using both whimsy and realism to craft displays for businesses such as
The Milwaukee Journal, Gimbel's and Usinger's, Cerny said.
"She made the Usinger elves out of papier-māché," she said.
The artistic skills she brought to the museum were central to the
creation of scores of natural history exhibits and dioramas, according
to a statement from Jim Kelly, the museum's director of exhibits and
graphics.
"From Rocky Mountain habitats to southeastern mangrove swamps, the
diversity of Roberta's talents were tested time and again," Kelly
said.
One of her early projects at the museum involved the production of
2,000 leaves for a willow bush for a beaver pond diorama.
"That took me about 2 1/2 weeks," she said.
While creating scientifically accurate botanical reproductions for the
exhibits, Plummer also trained other artists, some of whom went on to
establish plant modeling departments for other museums, Kelly said.
Plummer's expertise in botanical reproduction enabled the museum to
venture into such projects as the rain forest exhibit.
She traveled to Costa Rica in 1986 to research and collect the
hundreds of botanical components that would be necessary for
reproducing the rain forest back in Milwaukee, Kelly said.
The exhibit "could never have been accomplished without her
participation," he said.
Plummer retired from the museum in 1990 and moved to Lake Alpine in
central Wisconsin. She traveled extensively and did volunteer work for
the museum, her daughter said.
By the time she retired, the museum had become like a second family
for Plummer, Cerny said.
"She was very much at home there," she said.
Plummer, who was preceded in death by her husband, is also survived by
another daughter, Loren Hill, and a son, Dale.
--
Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?