Dora K. Perry, Legacy Inductee (1926-2022), was one of very few Arizona women who broke the glass ceiling of historically male western artists dominating galleries and art shows from the mid 1970’s through the 1990’s.  Male sculptors during this period portrayed a western heritage that focused on cowboys or a resolute Indian with his tomahawk raised in defiance. Dora’s work, in stark contrast, portrayed action invoking more delicate subtleties. She memorialized a new approach to the western heritage of Arizona that focused primarily on women, children and horses. According to Don Dedera, former editor of Arizona Highways magazine, Dora created “minúte moments…. Tiny times when people and animals communicated with body language.”

Dora was born in Prescott, Arizona in 1926.  It was there that she fell in love with horses spending her allowance on horse books and riding whenever she could. Her family moved to Phoenix in 1940. She graduated from the University of Arizona in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts.  After her marriage to Allan Perry in 1949 she began painting portraits for family friends.  When her three children were very young, Dora enrolled in art school, attending evening classes at the Kachina School of Art under the direction of muralist Jay Datus.

The family moved to a horse property in Phoenix in 1964, where Dora rekindled her love of horses. In early 1975 she had a severe horseback riding accident, which incapacitated her for 6 months. During her recovery, art came to the forefront again.  She made her first horse “sculpture” out of newspaper and paste painted with a bronze finish. In 1976 Phoenix City Attorney Andrew Baumert saw the papier mâché horse and promised Dora if she cast it in bronze, he would buy it. She did and he did. Her career was launched.  She went back to art school, this time to study bronze sculpture under Ernest Burke.  

In Dora’s own words “My fingers couldn’t work fast enough for me to record all the wonderful poses I could see in everything around me.  My children, their friends, my friends, their children, the horses, the people would all seem to fall into poses that said something delightful to me and I was sure, to anyone who could see them.” She became known for her bronze sculptures and Western art displayed in galleries in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Perhaps her most celebrated creation was the Fiesta Bowl Football Trophy, commissioned in 1981 and first awarded in 1982. The Board of Directors of the Fiesta Bowl wanted a perpetual trophy celebrating Arizona, the Fiesta Bowl, and football. They chose Dora’s sculpture, The Game. Dora subsequently sculpted bronze awards for the Grand Master’s Trophy, The Band, which went to the winner of the Fiesta Bowl National Pageant of Bands; The Dancers, presented to the Fiesta Bowl Parade sweepstakes winner; and The Shot basketball trophy awarded to the winner of the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl Basketball Classic. Her contribution to Arizona in one of the premier events of the State, both in terms of public relations and in revenue enhancement, continued for 20 years until 2001 and was rekindled in 2023. 

In 1986 the Arizona Heart Institute Foundation commissioned Dora to create a sculpture award for an international Doctor of the Year.  Her Man of Medicine depicted a country doctor on horseback with his medicine bag. In 1997 Dora also designed and sculpted the Territorial Cup Trophy which in 1999 was renamed the Coaches Traveling Trophy and is still awarded annually to the winning football coach between rivals University of Arizona and Arizona State University.

 Close to Dora’s heart was her sculpture titled, Man’s Humanity to Man, which honored the kidney donor who saved her husband’s life. In 1996 she donated the sculpture depicting the gift of life to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. 

Among Dora’s sculptures was a child galloping on her horse without a bridle or saddle, another sitting on her horse eating an apple that the horse obviously thought was meant for him, and another of a leery horse turning towards the carrot from an outstretched hand while the young girl hid the bridle in her other hand behind her back. Dora enjoyed raising sheep and tried her hand at dyeing and spinning wool. That turned into the creation of her bronze of a Navajo woman with her young child in the sculpture Spinning Dreams.  Several other sculptures of Navajo women capture their dedication to their sheep herds.

In 1992 Dora’s husband suffered kidney failure and she fully devoted herself to him, restricting the amount of art she was able to produce. When he passed away in 2002, she had developed arthritis in her hands and was no longer able to sculpt. Dora was eccentric, talented, and so secure about who she was that she didn’t really pay attention to social norms.  Nor did she ever seek recognition or publicity.  She was 95 years old when she passed away in 2022, having produced a documented 63 bronze sculptures between 1976 and 1996, most of them depicting horses, children, and the Arizona west.