Tony Snow started woodworking when he retired in 2015, but it wasn’t until recently that he tried his hand at sculpting, inspired by a conversation with Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby.
Snow, a Chickasaw citizen, was a welder for 47 years. He was first introduced to welding his freshman year of high school at Purcell in a vocational agriculture class.
“I started tinkering with it and thought, ‘I can do this,’” Snow said.
He developed his skills further in his final two years of high school when he had a chance to study welding every afternoon at MidAmerica Technology Center in Wayne, Oklahoma. When he graduated high school in 1975 at age 17, he went straight to work building oil rigs off the shores of Louisiana.
He did that for four years until he moved back to Oklahoma and married Brenda, his wife of 47 years. Over the course of his career, he built equipment for oil and gas companies, started his own business doing general welding and eventually started building canopies for Sonic Drive-Ins across the country. The last five years of his career, he constructed metal shop buildings. He retired in 2015.
Upon retirement, Snow said he needed something to keep him busy. After 47 years of metal work, he longed for a new craft. He tried his hand at woodworking, making walking sticks out of bois d’arc wood. He would work the wood, revealing the natural beauty in the material, and then coat it with polyurethane to seal it and give it a gloss.
“Every piece of wood is different,” Snow said.
Snow kept working the wood, refining his technique as he went.
“I’ve gotten so addicted to it I can’t quit,” Snow said. “But I also can’t keep it all because it’s just too much.”
That is why Snow said he started going to art shows and markets. He began with smaller art shows and farmers’ markets, with the intention of selling his pieces, but once he started going to First American art shows, everything changed for him.
“The importance of selling kind of just went away,” Snow said. “I don’t care if I sell anything or not. I was meeting more people that just blew me away. Now I like to make stuff just to go to the shows and meet these artists.”
Even though Snow said he is not a sculptor, he had been thinking about attempting to carve an ivory-billed woodpecker for two or three years because of its significance to Chickasaw culture. He said in addition to being a significant symbol for the Chickasaw people, it was originally native to the historic Chickasaw Homeland.
Although not officially confirmed extinct by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the last commonly agreed upon sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker was in 1944 in the Tensas River region of northeast Louisiana. Thought to have a wingspan of around 30 inches and a length of around 20 inches, Snow said he was impressed with the size of the bird.
When Snow decided to create a more complicated piece, “Mystic Falls,” he decided to try his hand at carving and made a small ivory-billed woodpecker to mount on the side. “Mystic Falls” consists of a large piece of wood, hollowed out like a cliff face. Clear and turquoise resin pours down from the top into a turquoise pool at the base. Pieces of turquoise also lay in the crevices of the cliff, matching the water. The wooden part of the sculpture sits atop a rectangular pool of clear resin. Circular pieces of wood, like slices of a tree trunk, sit at the bottom of the pool, with traditional Chickasaw markings and symbols burned into them. The woodpecker perches along the side of the wooden waterfall, its beak sunk into the wood.
“Mystic Falls” is currently on exhibit at the ARTesian Gallery and Studios in Sulphur, Oklahoma, located at 100 W. Muskogee Ave.
After carving the small woodpecker, Snow wanted to create another one but this time life-size. He was nervous about it because he didn’t consider himself a carver or painter. Snow said he was afraid the $80 for the piece of wood would be wasted.
However, that all changed during the Arts and Culture Awards during the 2025 Chickasaw Annual Meeting and Festival.
At the awards, Governor Anoatubby was awarded a gorget designed by Andrew Scribner and Jason Perry in honor of his 50 years of service to the Chickasaw Nation.
After the awards, Snow and his wife were packing up their things from the judges’ room for the Southeastern Art Show and Market (SEASAM) when they ran into Governor Anoatubby. Snow was admiring the gorget and expressing his admiration for Governor Anoatubby. They discussed the significance of the woodpecker in Chickasaw culture, and Snow said he got chills. A week later, he went to Oklahoma City and bought the piece of wood he needed.
Snow worked diligently, carving the basswood into a life-size ivory-billed woodpecker which was very different from the bois d’arc he was used to working with. After a lot of time and effort, and careful examination by both him and his wife, Snow finalized the form of the woodpecker. Afterward, he painted it the distinctive red, white and black colors, which Snow notes are also culturally important colors.
Once the woodpecker was carved and painted, Snow entered more familiar territory, using bois d’arc wood to create a perch and a stand for the sculpture, which he proudly titled “The Governor.”
Even though Snow had traded in welding for wood, the expertise from his pre-retirement life came in handy for “The Governor.” The legs of the sculpture are constructed entirely from steel that Snow ground, bent, shaped and filed. The claws serve a double purpose as part of the sculpture but also a sturdy way for the woodpecker to perch on its stand.
He had the opportunity to showcase his piece to Governor Anoatubby and explain how he was the inspiration for it at the 2025 Hushtola Art Market
“I am not a carver,” Snow said. “This is a fluke. I think it all happened for a reason — to honor the Governor.”
Snow’s carving of the ivory-billed woodpecker was entered into the 2026 Artesian Arts Festival and won second place in its division. Next it will travel to the new Chickasaw Heritage Center in Tupelo, Mississippi, for its inaugural exhibit, “Chokka' Falama – Returning Home.”