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Jeffrey
Birch is a Minnesota native and spends most of the year at his home and studio
in Plymouth, Minnesota, and lake home in the northern part of the state. He has
lived, worked and traveled extensively in the West. He and his wife own property
in Sedona Arizona where they spend as much time as possible.
He has been sculpting since childhood when at the age of five his mother introduced him to modeling clay. He fashioned an imaginary world of characters and animals in his youth. From that early age, he also first developed an interest in the West. Westerns were a staple on television in the fifties and sixties, reinforcing his inherent interest. He loved the action and lore then, and is a serious student today of the history of the West, especially the period between 800 and 1850 when the plains Indian horse cultures were most fully attained.
A parallel interest in his teen years was museums. He attended classes at the St. Paul Science Museum, worked in the anthropology and paleontology departments as a lab assistant in high school and was fortunate to work on numerous archaeology digs in Minnesota and searched for dinosaurs all over the West with the paleontology department. During these exciting trips, he had an opportunity to first see the West, its vast prairies, mountains and deserts.
After high school, Mr. Birch attended the University of Minnesota studying art and anthropology. An available position in the art department at the museum in St. Paul was too tempting to pass up. As a museum artist, Mr. Birch developed dioramas and displays on varying subjects for the anthropology, zoology and paleontology departments. It was here that his formal art education really took place under the guidance of professional museum artists.
Mr. Birch left the museum in St. Paul to work with a number of museums around the country, specializing in helping communities start new science and technology centers. In the mid eighties, he was executive director of the Discovery Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada.
His career eventually led him into
commercial displays, exhibits and fixtures at which he worked for many years.
Recently, he has turned his attention primarily to his sculpture.
Mr. Birch has broad artistic interests. He is an accomplished landscape painter
in oil and is in final editing of his first novel set on a fictitious Indian
Reservation in Northern Minnesota. He can be contacted at his website:
jeffreybirchstudio.com or through
Grassland Gallery.