Frank Oebser, Little Program, Menomonie, WI
The Site
Frank Oebser’s Little Program was a small amusement park that filled a machine shed he had built for the purpose. Through a combination of kinetic and stationary sculptures, Oebser illustrated farm life in animals and people working and playing. He often started with a wooden armature and then filled the body structure with straw before wrapping them in plastic or tarpaulin and adding paint, newspaper clippings, and other found objects. The five sculptures in the Arts Center’s collection are all that remain of Oebser’s environment.
Frank Oebser
1900–1990
Frank Oebser was born in 1900 in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and lived his entire life on the family dairy farm. In the mid-1960s, he began to work on a series of whimsical and inventive kinetic and stationary sculptures. For Oebser, transforming obsolete machines into works of art answered both his desire to preserve the objects and his need for his farm to be a place of joy.
Oebser’s art environment grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Five of Oebser’s mixed-media sculptures were conserved and gifted to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center by the foundation in 1992.
