As Professor of Art at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Robbie Barber has taught Sculpture since 2000. His head-turning creation for True North in 2016 was titled “Stroll in the Park”—an oversized baby carriage made with welded steel and parts from an old trailer home. Barber says, “My architecture-related sculptures are influenced by my travels through rural America. I am attracted to the strong visual character of this country’s vernacular architecture. Vintage lap-board houses, mobile homes and agriculture-related structures have become regional icons that ultimately tell the stories of their inhabitants and builders. I often fuse these influences to create hybrid objects of fantasy, the results of which are often humorous, ironic or visually poetic in nature.” An example is this year’s sculpture, “Goddard Nomad V”—an out-of-this-world sculpture depicting a mobile home that has been transformed into a spacecraft of dubious reliability. The work is an homage to Robert Goddard—considered the father of modern rocketry—an American who invented the liquid propelled rocket by hand in the 1930s, leading to the Saturn V rockets that took us to the moon. After salvaging rocket thrusters previously used at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, Barber conceptualized and created the sculpture in 1991 during an artist residency in Roswell, New Mexico.