Faux Bear:
Nick Swearer’s “frumpy old bear suit”
“I think of it as the mascot bear,” says sculptor Nicholas Swearer, “the frumpy old bear suit the mascot wears at football games.”
In 1987 Swearer, then a young and struggling artist, was working on a series of bear sculptures when a group from the Class of 1949 approached him. They asked to purchase a bear in honor of Nick’s father, Howard, who was about to step down as Brown’s 15th president. So Nick mounted the statue on a massive stone slab (“No fraternity guys were going to carry that thing off,” he says), and the five-foot, six-inch bear was set in a little woodland garden outside Maddock Alumni Center. It was dedicated Nov. 12, 1988.
“It’s a child’s bear,” Swearer says. “It’s child-size, and it’s reaching out to you.” The bear has the ratty texture of a well-loved toy and is reminiscent of beasts in Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are.
“Frumpy, but comforting,” Swearer says. “Whenever I pass it, I think of my father.” Howard Swearer died in 1991.
“I never gave it a name,” Swearer says. He also didn’t reveal the bear’s secret. When he first cast the work, it was just a hollow, frumpy old bear suit. But then he sculpted a pair of eyes peering out from behind the bear’s grin.
Adults tend to miss this detail, but children whose eyes are level with the bear’s mouth notice it right away. In the late afternoon the sun slants in and briefly catches those hidden eyes. For a brief moment even a grown-up can get the joke.
Other Brown bears: The Breslau Bear.
(Adapted from the Brown Alumni Magazine, May/June 2002)