Herb Mignery

The American cowboy is described by historians as a person of simple tastes and few possessions. Herb Mignery fit this description in 1963, when he left the United States army carrying his only belongings, a guitar and a saddle, bent on becoming an artist.

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Mignery was reared on the family ranch near Bartlett, Nebraska. The Mignery clan had made their living by ranching for 110 years and naturally assumed he would continue the tradition. As it turned out, he did—but with a special twist to the tale. He is indeed a great cowboy but also a talented sculptor of character types of the historic West.

He has worked in a variety of mediums, but in 1973 he cast his first bronze. He decided then that sculpture would be his field, and bronze his medium. Since that time, he has executed numerous small works and larger monuments, which are to be found in both public and private collections across the nation.

At the National Sculpture Society’s (NSS’s) annual exhibition in 2008, held for the first time at Brook Green Gardens in South Carolina, Mignery received the Leonard J. Meiselman Memorial Award and was named an NSS Fellow. He is an elected member of the NSS board of directors. At the 2008 Cowboy Artists of America Sale and Exhibition, he won the Gold Medal for sculpture and the Ray Swanson Memorial Award. In 2000, Mignery received the Western Art Associates’ Kieckhefer Award, and the Best of Show prize for his bronze sculpture The Sower at the Cowboy Artists of America Sale and Exhibition in Phoenix, Arizona. The Sower also won the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation Award for Sculpture at the Autry National Center of the American West in 2001.

Herb Mignery is represented by Settlers West Galleries Inc., Tucson, Arizona; and Trailside Galleries, Jackson, Wyoming, and Scottsdale, Arizona.