A Parade of 100 Massive Elephant Sculptures Barrels Into Beverly Hills

After a year making its way across the country, “The Great Elephant Migration” has reached its final destination, touching down in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles County.

The environmentally minded public art show, which has traveled 5,000 miles, features 100 life-size elephants crafted by Indigenous artisans of the Coexistence Collective, in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in south India—most of which are portraits of actual elephants who live there. (A couple of African elephants from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya have also snuck into the parade.)

Each piece is made from lantana camara, an invasive weed that has proliferated across India, sculpted onto a steel rebar frame. The project removes the lantana camara and converts what isn’t used for the art into a fertilizing product called biochar. That means the project is actively working to improve elephant habitats, while also raising money for 22 conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.

The elephant artworks have been for sale along the route, with the artisan collective crafting new versions of each of the purchased pieces to prevent the thinning of the herd. With works priced between $8,000 for the babies (five feet tall) and $22,000 for a 15-foot-tall adult male with tusks, sales have totaled over $3 million to date.

A Cross Country Trek Concludes

The hit public art show has been on the move since last July, when the herd appeared on the seaside cliffs of Newport, R.I.

It’s made for quite the nationwide spectacle in every stop on its expedition west: taking to the cobblestone streets of New York’s Meatpacking District; the sands of Miami Beach during Art Basel; the green lawns of Houston’s Hermann Park; overlooking the majestic Grand Tetons at Jackson Hole’s National Museum of Wildlife Art; and along the Rocky Mountain Front in Browning, Montana.

The trip’s last stop is Beverly Gardens Park, across from the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts—fitting, as the center’s namesake is also funding the new Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a vegetated overpass designed to help animals safely cross the city’s 101 freeway.

First designed in 2015, the nearly one-acre bridge—the largest in the world—is being constructed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and is expected to open next year. There won’t be any real elephants crossing, but species who use it are expected to include mountain lions, bobcats, gray foxes, coyotes, and mule deer.

Art transportation is an expensive and complicated proposition even on the best of days—like when you’re not moving 100 full-scale elephants—and the organizers knew they wanted to stage the show in the most environmentally friendly way possible. So the elephants made the trip down the East Coast and cross country to California via a fleet of electric trucks.

In a festive touch that doubled as nod to the artworks’ origins, the trucks were decorated with traditional Indian lorry art.

The Woman Behind the Stampede

“The Great Elephant Migration” is a project with an impressive scale, dreamed up by Ruth Ganesh as part of her work fighting to protect Asian elephants as a trustee of the U.K. NGO Elephant Family. She founded the Real Elephant Collective nonprofit, which oversees the artisan collective, with scientist and elephant researcher Tarsh Thekaekara, whose wife, Shubhra Nayar, designed each individualized sculpture.

The artists actually live in harmony with the elephants they are representing in these artworks—a message Ganesh hopes has resonated with audiences as the sculptures have made their way across the country.

“It is a symbolic journey on behalf of all wildlife that is currently navigating a very human-dominated world—crossing roads, navigating train tracks, agricultural plantations, and towns and cities,” Ganesh told the .

The project was originally launched overseas, at India’s Kochi Biennale in 2019. Other international outings followed in London in 2021, and at the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, India, in 2024. But to bring the herd to the U.S., Ganesh enlisted Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport, as the curator.

What’s With the Blankets?

There’s an added fundraising element in the exhibition’s final stop, with an auction on Artsy of 70 bespoke blankets created by both high-fashion designers and Indigenous communities around the world. The initiative is called “Wrapped in History,” and was unveiled in a ceremony draping the blankets over the herd upon its arrival in California. The protective gesture is deeply rooted in tradition.÷

“In many cultures around the world, we honor wisdom and genius, if you will, with blankets,” Cristina Mormorunni, co-founder and director of conservationist group Indigenous Led, told the . “This blanketing ceremony is really special because it’s bringing together Indigenous artistry and culture and ceremony with some of the most incredible fashion houses on the planet.”

Indian designer Vikram Goyal curated the selection of blankets, including contributing a work of his own that translates his favored technique, hammered repoussé metalwork, into textile form. The piece is based on one of his gilded wall sculptures, which was in turn inspired by a 17th-century Rajput manuscript called that features traditional Indian symbols of elephants, according to .

“Blankets are vessels of protection, identity, and story,” Goyal, said in a statement. “In this context, each one becomes a monumental gesture, a way of honoring the past while materially supporting a more compassionate, interdependent future.”

Some of the other blankets are by Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg, the Navajo Nation, and the Chanakya School of Craft, a nonprofit that teaches traditional embroidery techniques to women in India. The online “Wrapped in History” benefit auction runs July 1 through August 1.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com