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This book, Lee Lawrie’s Prairie Deco: is the first book written exclusively about Lawrie’s Largest Architectural Sculpture Commission in his career, which spanned from the Gaslight Era until the Space Age. It 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.

Lee Lawrie’s Prairie Deco is a lavishly-illustrated, well-written, non-fiction result of nearly two decades worth of research on how Lawrie’s Largest Collection of Art Deco Sculpture anywhere on earth came together on one of the America’s most beautiful Art Deco Palaces half a continent away, from where it was conceived and designed, in his studio in Harlem during the heart of the Jazz Age and the onset of the Great Depression.

“Prairie Deco” is the term I use to convey the sense of Lee Lawrie’s explosively imaginative and creative marriage of Art Deco with Regionalism: infusing Art Deco with Prairie iconography, to tell the story of Nebraska’s History in India limestone and bronze. Picture inside of PRAIRIE DECO tells a story, and these are a glorious homage to the Native American Tribes, who first lived in the state, and the Institutions of Government and Democracy that the Europeans brought with them as they settled.

The Capitol was also originally intended to serve as a memorial to the nearly 800 Nebraskans who died “over there” during the so-called “War to End All Wars.”

The book also relates the fate that awaited the Native Americans, as the early explorers, the fur trappers, railroads, homesteaders and penetrated and settled this portion of the Great Plains. 

Read the Prologue