Sitting at a small, dust-covered table in her Oologah studio, sculptor Sandra Van Zandt slowly stirred a steaming cup of Top Ramen soup.

“I don’t know why anyone would be interested in my time with American [Airlines],” she says nonchalantly, her clay-stained fingers wrapped around the styrofoam cup.

Van Zandt, a widely acclaimed bronze artist and member of Verdigris Valley Electric, never set out to be a sculptor. She studied art in college, but after graduation went straight to work for American Airlines as an international flight attendant. Sculpting was just a hobby she picked up along the way.

Today, the same hands that create $50,000 sculptures also crack open Cokes and pass out pillows. Although her hobby has grown into a prosperous business, Van Zandt has surprisingly stuck with American.

“The best case scenario is, of course, that you earn a whole living from your artwork,” Van Zandt says. “You can be a great artist, but until you get that following—you get people who start collecting you or galleries [that] have heard about you—you can starve. The only thing that’s close is being an actor. They all have to have that job where they’re waiters or whatever while they’re perfecting their craft and getting noticed out there.”

But Van Zandt is getting noticed. She has 40 public art installations spread across eight states, including the Pistol Pete sculpture in Oklahoma State University’s Gallagher-Iba Arena and a sculpture in the Oklahoma State Capitol of the first woman elected to state office.

The walls of her rural art studio are covered with mementos from projects: photos of Van Zandt with state and local politicians, military patches and uniforms given to her by grateful service members. There are even personal notes from Apollo astronaut Stuart Roosa and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Van Zandt’s sculptures are popular today, especially as municipalities large and small seek to honor some part of their history. 

“It’s those types of things that are so interesting to us now, to save that bit of history,” Van Zandt’s husband and business manager Doug Van Zandt explains. “Five or 10 years ago, it was ‘wow, somebody’s going to commission us to do a big one. We can eat, we can sleep, we can buy a new car.’ But it’s that saving a bit of history in a community that is so much more important. There are so many stories out there, it’s just unbelievable. We’re bringing something that is going to remind people of their heritage and who they were.”

Completing a life-sized bronze sculpture takes about a year, and a fair bit of that time is devoted to research.

“As you get older, you realize that there’s a lot of history in so many things,” the sculptor says. “I like learning the stories.”

When Van Zandt was working on a sculpture of Will Rogers and his horse for the city of Oologah she called an equine expert from OSU to make sure the horse was accurate.

“Everyone in this country is a horse expert,” Doug laughs. “We could make Will Rogers look like Lyle Lovett and they wouldn’t know the difference, but let me tell you, that horse has to be right.”

When possible, Van Zandt likes to meet her subjects in person, and her airline flying privileges make that much easier.
While working with the city of Tomball, Texas to create a sculpture of a train conductor for the town’s railroad station, the Van Zandts traveled to Tomball’s sister city in Germany, where they met the mayor.

“Right before we left I said, ‘let me take a picture,’” Van Zandt says, spreading out photos of the man taken from many angles. “When we came back, we knew we were going to do this conductor. We said, ‘well, what do you think about putting his face on there as something a little bit quirky?’ As it happened, the mayor’s son is an exchange student [in Tomball] this year, so he got to help unveil his father.”