"Monstrance for a Grey Horse"
In just a few years after it appeared on campus, this enigmatic sculpture has become a good-luck charm and object of worship for many Southwestern students.
"Monstrance for a Grey Horse," now known simply as “Monstrance” by students, is a hallmark of any current Southwestern campus tour, and an important cultural touchstone for current student life.
All throughout the school year, but especially during exam and holiday seasons, students will leave “offerings” to Monstrance. These offerings can be for many things: while they are usually for luck on tests, students can also ask for guidance or blessings. Whether or not Monstrance responds is irrelevant; rather, it is the act of sacrifice that seems to imbue the sculpture with such incredible power.
Common offerings are single-serve snack packages, fruit, wildflowers, and pumpkins, particularly around Halloween. These items are laid at the base of plinth or stacked, tied, and hung from the horse skull itself. Now ritualized communicative practices, passed from student to student, have dictated that it is good luck to leave an offering, and unspeakably bad luck to take an offering. This results in a consistent pile at the base of Monstrance, which grows and shrinks as the seasons change.
This campus tradition has created strong collective memory surrounding the sculpture, and a powerful community feeling regarding its presence. Put simply, Monstrance is revered on campus, inspiring poetry and art such as that displayed in the May 2023 Megaphone: one student wrote a poem about Monstrance as a good-luck charm, featured alongside photographs of offerings stacked around its head. This is just one tangible example of the awe that students feel towards Monstrance.
This pagan, cult-like, almost religious following perhaps echoes the creation of "Monstrance for a Grey Horse" itself. On the Southwestern website, there is a news release from 2011 announcing the gift of the sculpture. According to the news release, “Monstrance,” was begun in 1980 and hand-carved over a twelve-year period by artist and sculptor James Acord, and was named after the object in which the eucharist is held in the Catholic church. The sculpture is meant to be a reliquary and a commentary on the nuclear age and the evolution of society.
Acord was fascinated by nuclear science, and made the sculpture out of granite, which contains uranium and will supposedly last 30,000 years – the half life of radioactive material. For this sculpture, Acord acquired a license to handle nuclear materials, and while he was unable to obtain the necessary components, the license was so important to him that he got the license number tattooed on the back of his neck. His intention was to place the sculpture at the edge of nuclear waste sites as a sort of reminder of the power of nuclear energy and the potential dangers of this power.
A common Southwestern student myth is that the sculpture itself is radioactive, or that its base contains radioactive materials. The base of the statue does contain a stainless steel canister of crushed Fiesta ware, a pottery that is known for its uranium glaze which becomes more dangerous upon being broken. However, the material is less so actually radioactive than symbolic of radioactivity.
Following its life at Acord’s own studio and then its stay at journalist Fred Moody’s house, the statue was purchased in 2000 by Southwestern alumnus Joey King, the person responsible for the King Creativity Fund, and officially moved to the university in 2011.
"Monstrance for a Grey Horse" used to reside on the east side of the Library, facing the Fine Arts Center, but as a part of building the decks on the front of the the Library in the summer of 2021, the statue was moved to the north side of the Library where it now stands, facing the Academic Mall.
Early photos show the statue as a clean white-gray granite; now, it is darkened from weathering and the many fruit and vegetable offerings over the years, and stands almost as a sentinel, its empty eyes watching over students as they pass by.
Most students speak of Monstrance with respect, almost deference. A select few regard the statue as almost a deity, crafted with grand purpose and deigning to look favorably upon the students of Southwestern. The use of the statue as a good-luck charm, or perhaps even a being of some higher power, was outside of the institutionally designated use of the statue as an educational tool to teach about nuclear dangers. The folk practice of laying sacrifices has helped to solidify Monstrance as an object that exists solely for students, who have crafted a rich and unique memory practice surrounding the statue.
