Humble Beginnings Lead to a Big Future - A Look Back

As I continue the journey of writing a book about Taylor Studios, I’ve been researching our early years. We started the company in 1991. Many of those exhibits still exist and are pretty amazing. What I call “big wows.” Since it’s that time of year where we often reflect and have a sense of nostalgia. Here’s a look back at some of our really cool old projects.

In 1994 we got our first big project at what is now called The History Museum in South Bend, IN. We created two immersive walk-through environments. One depicting a portage path through the woods and the other a dredge boat scene clearing swamps to create farm land. At this time, we were still working out of our garage and on the kitchen table. This project was lot to fit into a small space. We ended up doing the murals in the loft of a barn on the property we were renting. I recently reached out to their Deputy Executive Director, Kristie Erickson, to see if the exhibits were still there. She said, “The two rooms are definitely still part of our Voyages permanent exhibit! Those two areas are some of my favorite areas of Voyages, I was actually down there the other day looking at the portage murals, it seems like every time I see something new.”

In 1997 we got our next biggest job ever for the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. This project was for several aquarium environments including delta, bay, and gulf habitat pools, and 16 smaller aquarium inserts. While installing this project a hurricane hit the island. Some of our team stayed on the island and I went off to New Orleans to ride it out. There was no damage to our exhibits. We used to say, “our exhibits survive hurricanes.” Here’s an old sell sheet for that project.

In December of 1997 we were hired to design exhibits for the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures in Urbana, IL. The exhibit galleries are organized by geography, covering hundreds of years of human history and are supported by their impressive collection of artifacts. The main floor includes the central core, Indigenous North and South America and the Ancient Mediterranean. The second floor houses East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa, Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt. This was an exciting and daunting project for our small staff. We struggled with project management of such a large project. This led to the much better processes we have today. I’m proud of the design work we did and can still see that work today when visiting the museum.

This is young Jason Cox, our Creative Director, working in the front room of the house probably on The Spurlock Museum designs.

 In the late 90s we finally had a real production building. Our landlord built it for us. One of the cooler projects (of course, I think they’re all cool) we fabricated in our new building was for the South Florida Museum. The first project was a First People’s diorama. It’s located in a two-story atrium space at the entry to the museum. It’s a grand space and it needed a grand scene. The landscape depicts a prehistoric bison hunt. The setting is along a small stream which includes animal models such as a river bass, box turtle and rabbit. It’s a father/son hunting expedition and these paleo hunters with atlatls and spears are sneaking up on a giant prehistoric bison. The highly realistic figures show the anxiety on the face of the young boy and a focused look from the father. The hand painted mural extends up two stories into the atrium space. It is a dramatic scene and makes quite the impression when visitors enter the space. A few years later after we moved to our own building in Rantoul we fabricated more exhibits for them including a Tocobaga village.

Here’s an old marketing piece we did on that project.

 We built our first Woolly mammoth in the new production building on the farm. We’ve done several more since then. This first one was for the International Wildlife Museum in Tucson, AZ. They also had us fabricate an Irish Elk. For both of these models they had the real tusks and antlers in their collection. We were able to make casts of these to use in our sculptures. Back then my horses lived right next to the production studio and I used the stalls in the barn where we painted the murals for The History Museum. This is a picture of me and Charlotte, the best horse anyone could have, next to our first woolly mammoth. 

 We accomplished a lot in those early years even though we only had a garage, a renovated chicken coop and a kitchen table to start. Persistence pays off.

Our first dinosaur model we created in the garage. We have a more orderly shop these days.

We eventually renovated this chicken coop to have more space. These Salmon fish models were shipped to Alaska for an exhibit.

Tatijana one of our first employees working on the kitchen table.

Tim and Joy, also some of our first employees working near the kitchen table.

 After almost 30 years in business and over 700 projects completed we’ve come a long way from our humble start. I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane.