Celebrating 100 Years of the Elmwood Park Zoo with a Growl and a Hoot

A new Owl is on the prowl at Temple University Ambler. This new member of the campus community just happens to come in the shape of a jaguar, given to the University by the Elmwood Park Zoo to celebrate the Zoo’s 100^th anniversary.

The celebratory statue will welcome students and visitors to campus along the pathway near the Ambler Campus Learning Center.

Temple’s jaguar is one of 13 making their home throughout Montgomery County, all painted by local artists — in Temple’s case very local.

Tyler School of Art and Architecture student Anh Thuy Minh Pham was the creative mind behind the painted wingspread owl motif that adorns Temple Ambler’s new big cat.

The Spirit of Temple

“When my design was chosen, I felt happy and a little fearful at the same time at the beginning. It’s been fun but it’s also been challenging,” said Pham, a Graphic Design major who will graduate in 2025. “I had to figure out how to take a two-dimensional design and translate it to three dimensions. It’s a complicated structure, but I liked figuring out how to make it work.”

According to Pham, her design was the result of “wanting to connect the jaguar to Temple and the Zoo and combine that all together.”

“I went through a number of sketches but for the one that was chosen, the idea was that the owl was a costume for the jaguar,” she said. “My hope is that people get the ‘Temple vibe’ from the sculpture.”

Temple Ambler’s jaguar is adorned with what is essentially an owl cape and headdress complimented by a sporty pair of Temple basketball shorts.

“I feel like when I study with the Temple students, they are really competitive in a good way. They are hardworking,” Pham said. “I feel like Temple students are warriors. I want people to feel like the jaguar is representing the Temple spirit.”

Imagination Without Boundaries

According to Keith Warren Greiman, Adjunct Professor of Design and Illustration and a Tyler alumnus, Pham has proved to be a warrior in her own right when approaching the jaguar project.

“Anh has been pretty fearless through this whole experience. She was learning to use new materials, but she went through the process rapidly, which I think speaks to her level of excitement and engagement,” he said. “It’s a five-hour in-studio class and 90 percent of the time it’s the students physically working on their projects. In this class, the students were also working on these big 4-foot by 8-foot murals, so Anh was basically pulling double duty and she put all of her creativity into both projects. For any student wanting to truly determine if this is what they want to do with their lives, this project was a great way to get experience; to get out there and let your work be seen.”

"(Murals)are not bound by the limitations of the size of a printed page or the size of a screen — working on murals was a great opportunity for the students to get paint on their hands and put a brush to a surface."
Matt Curtius, Associate Professor of Graphic and Interactive Design

While the Elmwood Park Zoo provided certain parameters to follow, “ultimately they said ‘Make it about what you want to make it about,’” said Matt Curtius, Associate Professor of Graphic and Interactive Design.

“It fit perfectly into the mural class we were developing for our Graphic and Interactive Design students. Graphic and Interactive Design students are on screens a lot; it’s a very tech forward program,” he said. “The mural class was an interesting one because just by the nature of murals many of them are done by hand, they are experienced in person. They are not bound by the limitations of the size of a printed page or the size of a screen — working on murals was a great opportunity for the students to get paint on their hands and put a brush to a surface.”

Curtius said that certainly applies to the jaguar sculpture as well “where not only is it bigger than a screen or printed page, it is also a three-dimensional surface.”

“Outside of Temple, Keith and I are illustrators. Illustrators like finding the space for their voice within the parameters of an assignment. This was a chance for the students to experience that directly with an actual assignment, one that was going to be seen publicly,” he said. “During the brainstorming phase we were exploring the idea of what does Temple mean. A lot of students were grappling with what to do with the combination of a Temple Owl and a jaguar. Anh’s design took it on directly — it’s one animal dressing up like another animal.”

“Initially, the first round was just coming up with some ideas to ease the students into it then we did two rounds of sketches. Matt and I looked at the ideas and the students gave feedback to one another,” he said. “We worked our way through the obvious representations of Temple and then the less obvious things. I think for many of the students, this was a great project to take them out of their comfort zone and experience something new.”

With graphic design majors, Curtius said, “you naturally assume they’ve come through the pipeline of high school art classes.”

“Often their connection with creating art goes all the way back to elementary school art classes where there’s that great, messy quality of getting your hands dirty. But you will hear some students say, ‘I’ve never painted’ or ‘I don’t know how to paint,’” he said. “It can be a little intimidating at first, but it was a pretty seamless transition from their comfortable, digital universe to these giant works. They might initially be intimidated, but the execution was exceptional.”

Owls and Jaguars and Skunks (Oh My!)

The Elmwood Park Zoo has a long history of partnering with Temple University. Stella, Temple’s living owl mascot (and close, personal friend of Hooter) who livens up any event she takes part in, sporting or otherwise, calls Elmwood home.

The Elmwood Park Zoo has been part of Temple Ambler EarthFest programming dating back to 2004, the second year EarthFest events were offered. The Zoo will be returning to campus on Saturday, September 21, with several animal ambassadors for the Science of Scary and Temple Ambler Campout.

Sarah Peterson, Education Administrator at the Elmwood Park Zoo, said Elmwood’s Animal Ambassadors “act as representatives of their wild counterparts, helping guests to get an up-close and personal experience that will hopefully make a lasting impression.”

“When a guest has a personal connection to these animals, it can lead to better understanding and more empathy towards the species and its habitat and will hopefully encourage positive action in protecting and conserving wildlife,” she said.

Peterson said collaborating with Temple and other community partners “helps make conservation more accessible and relatable by allowing guests to engage with different aspects of the natural world that they may not have previously encountered or wouldn't be comfortable exploring on their own."

"It helps to introduce them to ways that they can personally be involved, even in a small way, through citizen science," she said. "Providing opportunities for the community to get a hands-on, up-close experience with natural science topics in a safe and fun environment can help prevent fear and build a better understanding of these animals."

Celebrating a Centennial

For the Elmwood Park Zoo’s centennial celebration, “we wanted to really get out in the community and figure out ways that everyone could help celebrate with us, which is how the Jaguar Prowl project originated,” said Jennifer Conti, Development Director at the Elmwood Park Zoo and a Temple alumnus who majored in Public Relations with the minor in Environmental Studies.

“One of the things the Zoo is focusing on moving forward is different ways to tie the arts into animals. The Zoo is proud to be a cultural institution — we think our animals are like a living museum — and always appreciate the arts and equal access to the arts,” she said. “We really enjoy the partnership we have with Temple, not only with Stella going to the games and the Zoo participating in EarthFest programs, but with the Charles L. Blockson Exhibition at the Center Theater in Norristown. I’m a Temple grad, our Board President is the Temple grad, and personally I was hoping we could get the jaguar project to fly — pun intended — at Temple where students could be involved in creating the design.”

Conti said the Zoo team was very excited to learn that Tyler students would not only be involved in creating a design for Temple’s jaguar, a student would also be getting hands-on making that design a reality.

“I thought it was a great project for the students. That was something that I always enjoyed about being a student and a graduate of Temple — they really immerse you and throw you into it; that was valuable to me,” she said. “I started at the Elmwood Park Zoo 15 years ago as an intern while I was still in school and worked my way up to now running my department; I think that drive is something that Temple helped foster in me. You know you’re a Temple Owl, everyone knows the school, but you need to go out and show them what you can do.”

Meeting the Needs of the Zoo, Temple and Themselves

With the jaguar project, the students were tasked with “satisfying the clients, in this case Temple and the Zoo,” said Greiman.

“At the same time, the most important thing was to make something that satisfied themselves. It should be something you would have made regardless of the assignment that, in turn, satisfies the assignment,” he said. “For them to work through that process in a practical way, I think, was a great experience for the students. For the public, I hope that it causes them to pause, stop and enjoy — that’s really all you can ask for. You want people to stop and engage with the piece.”

Illustrators must balance “the needs of a project with their own artistic needs,” Curtius added.

“If a student makes up their own project parameters, they can potentially nudge them a little bit, but you can’t do that with a project for a client. It gives the students the opportunity to really test their skills, skills they’ve been working on throughout their education,” he said. “Now they’ve got a client under their belt — it’s not all hypothetical; they can physically show what they can do. Anh has this piece that she can come back to and see that it is a direct representation of her time at Temple.”