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Meet the Herd

November 25, 2024

By Louise Irvine

The elephants are here! The Great Elephant Migration has arrived in Miami Beach in time for Art Week and they look amazing! The life-size sculptures in this public art installation have taken up residence on the beach between 36th and 37th Streets and will be there until December 8th. This exciting coexistence project inspired our new Elephant Safari exhibition at WMODA, and you can discover more about pachyderms in pottery when you visit us.

The public appeal of pachyderms in Florida is not new. Carl Fisher, the entrepreneur of Miami Beach, acquired two live elephants to entertain tourists in the 1920s. Carl II, a two-year-old elephant, was a gift to Fisher from Ed Ballard, who owned six circuses. The baby elephant arrived in Florida in 1921 and was put to work hauling topsoil and clearing mangrove forests on the barrier island that became Miami Beach. Fisher claimed he would “get a million dollars worth of advertising out of this elephant” and used photographs of his elephant to promote Miami Beach throughout the United States.

One of Fisher’s early photo opportunities was the visit of President-elect Warren G. Harding, who was photographed with the elephant as his golf caddy. Carl II then appeared in the silent movie The Lotus Eaters sharing a scene with John Barrymore. He posed in the water with bathers jumping off his back and had a cart constructed to take children for rides. Occasionally, Carl was unruly, and his original trainer quit because of safety concerns. However, he was renamed Nero and bonded with a hotel gardener who became his new trainer until he rejoined the circus in 1925.

In 1923, Fisher received a second elephant gift from Ed Ballard to be Nero’s companion. Rosie became even more famous and upstaged glamorous bathing beauties in photographs. On one occasion, Rosie was invited to “make a deposit” at a bank opening and as cameras flashed, she left an unplanned “deposit’ on the bank’s marble floor! Rosie was taught how to do the Charleston and to hold a golf ball on the tip of her trunk for a professional golfer to take a swing. After the devastating hurricane of 1926, Rosie was put to work propping up the palm trees. She continued to entertain children and tourists until 1932 when her maintenance costs exceeded her promotional value, and she was moved to Atlanta Zoo.

Today, we are more mindful of the damage done to wild animals in captivity, and we prefer to capture their magnificence with our cameras and admire them in art.  We urgently need to address the fact that these giants of the animal kingdom are being driven to extinction due to habitat loss and ivory poaching.  No longer can we ignore the proverbial “elephant in the room.”

The herd of elephants now in Miami Beach represents a global fundraising initiative encouraging the human race to share space with nature.  The Coexistence Collective, a team of Indigenous artists in South India, crafted the 100 life-size sculptures in the Great Elephant Migration, which is raising money to power human-wildlife coexistence. Read more about their story thegreatelephantmigration.org

Thank you to Gregg Whittecar for taking photographs of the Great Elephant Migration in Miami Beach

Discover more about elephants at work and in the wild at the Elephant Safari exhibition when you visit WMODA.

100 Elephants @ WMODA | Wiener Museum

Bees for Elephants | Wiener Museum

Golden Elephants | Wiener Museum

Jumbo to Dumbo | Wiener Museum

Trunks in Trouble | Wiener Museum