In the 1970s, downtown Kansas City’s art scene was alive with experimentation. Installation and conceptual art were in full swing, drawing inspiration from international figures like Christo, whose wrapped walkways at Loose Park had captured the city’s imagination. For young artists coming of age at that time, Kansas City felt like a place where new ideas could take flight.
One of those artists was a 20-year-old sculpture student at the Kansas City Art Institute named Gary Whitmer. His first sculpture workshop introduced him to the world of inflatables, a boundary-pushing medium that used air and plastic to create large-scale, temporary forms. The students explored the possibilities of these flexible sculptures, and it was there that inspiration struck.
As Kansas City prepared to host the Republican National Convention in 1976, Whitmer decided he “wanted to make an inflatable elephant,” a choice that wasn’t deeply political for the time. “The elephant is the emblem of the Republican Party, but politics weren’t divisive then,” Whitmer recalls. The project was more about playfulness and scale. When he pitched the idea to the Board of Directors at Downtown Inc., they decided to take a chance on the young artist. They commissioned the project for just over $2,300.
With a 75-cent toy elephant from the local dime store as a model, he and a fellow art student, Debbie, set out to enlarge it tenfold. Using dressmaking techniques, they charted out each section on graph paper, created stencils, cut the shapes from sheets of plastic, and heat-seamed them together in a borrowed warehouse. Soon, the team was renting scaffolding six tiers high, hiring classmates to help assemble the massive work, and rigging cables to hoist the elephant over the iconic Barney Allis Plaza.
The final sculpture was ambitious— approximately 55 feet long and 50 feet tall—but when inflated, it proved too heavy to lift upright. Instead of floating gracefully above the plaza, the elephant slumped over it. President Gerald Ford even made an appearance in Kansas City that same week, leading the local press to joke about the “deflated Republican elephant.”
“Everyone had fun with it, even when it failed,” Whitmer says. Though he was mortified at first, thinking his artistic reputation had been ruined, the project became something of a legend. Local media ran multiple articles, lightheartedly framing the collapsed elephant as a metaphor for a struggling political party. The next morning, the team tried to reinflate it, but the Kansas City wind had other plans, twisting the sculpture until it finally deflated for good.
Despite its fate, the inflatable elephant captured the spirit of 1970s downtown Kansas City—bold, experimental, and a little unpredictable. It was a reminder that sometimes, the beauty of public art lies not in perfection, but in the courage to try something larger than life.
