This exhibition focuses on the collection of firearms that Tucson artist and collector Raymond Wielgus has created. As unique art forms, these firearms reflect Wielgus’s appreciation for craftsmanship, sculptural form, and a discerning aesthetic. They are modified according to a unique personal aesthetic: hand engraved, inlayed with gold, and their grips are of antique hand carved ivory.

Wielgus was born in Chicago in 1920 and learned to make furniture patterns in his father’s shop. At an early age he became a carver. He attended the School of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois where his interest was sculpture. After graduation he joined a Chicago design and engineering firm as manager of the prototype model department, and in 1949 he founded his own company, Wielgus Product Models. Here he produced prototype models for design organizations and industry.

In the 1950s, Wielgus was looking for an outside interest and began collecting African, Oceanic, and Pre-columbian materials; much of his collection can be found at the Indiana University Art Museum. His collecting was guided by certain principles that carry over to his engraved, inlayed, and carved guns. “My aim in collecting is not to amass a great number of pieces, but to acquire a small group of objects that combine three admittedly intangible characteristics: esthetic excellence, ethnographic or archaeological importance, and that quality that perhaps is best described by the adjective ‘right.’”

This exhibition will also include a vignette installation of firearms from the Museum’s Rogers and Mary Ellen Aston Collection of the American West, to be shown in relationship with Wielgus’s guns.