Bust of Alice Marriott

Alexandra Alaupovic was born Dec. 21, 1921, in Podravska Slatina, Croatia, growing up in a small town and an artistic family. Her mother, Jelka, was an accomplished watercolorist who taught art at the local grammar school. Her father, Josip, was an amateur painter and musician as well as an attorney and later a judge. His brother, Antun, studied painting at a German art academy.

She created her first sculpture, a clay bust of a policeman, at the age of 5. When Alaupovic was 6, her father told her he wished she would become an attorney but said she could be an artist if she wanted. He told her, “Whatever you’re going to do, do the best.”

After she graduated from high school in 1940, Alaupovic started business school in Zagreb in what was then Yugoslavia. She spent a year in business classes and then worked as a secretary for three years. She said she needed the money and had reservations about going to art school with the Nazis in power. “I didn’t want to be doing Hitler’s portrait,” she said in 2004.

She entered the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb in 1944. One of her first projects was a bust of a Serbian orphan whose family had been killed by Croatian Nazis, a sculpture she kept and eventually brought with her to Oklahoma.

After World War II, Yugoslavia fell under Communist rule, she created “Struggle I,” a bronze sculpture of an individual being pulled by two others representing art and family. The sculpture expressed her struggle to balance raising a young daughter, working as an artist and getting up at 4 a.m. to wait in lines for food.

In addition to food shortages, Alaupovic faced limits on her artistic style and expression. “Struggle I” wasn’t accepted for juried shows in Yugoslavia because it had too much space when monolithic sculptures were the norm. Realism was the accepted style, she said, and modernism was not taught.

In 1960, Alaupovic came to Oklahoma so her husband, Petar could take a job with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Alexandra Alaupovic enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where she learned welding, won the 1964 Oscar Jacobson Award for her sculpture “Moon Girl” and earned her master of fine arts degree. She started her teaching career at OU and then spent several years as an art professor at Oklahoma City University.

Locally, she is known for her Bart Conner sculpture at Sam Viersen Gymnastics Center at OU, Amelia Earhart bust at Science Museum Oklahoma, Henry Overholser bust at Overholser Mansion, “The Tree of Life” at Mercy Medical Center and her torch sculpture at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

Her work is included in the Oklahoma State Art Collection at the state Capitol and is part of the permanent collections at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Norick Art Center, Casady School, OU Health Sciences Center, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Her biography is included in Contemporary American Women Sculptors, North American Women Artists of the 20th Century, and Who’s Who in America.