Gene and Rebecca Tobey (Gene: 1945 – 2006; Rebecca: b. c. 1950) are a Santa Fe-based artistic partnership whose abstracted animal sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and embossed paper have made them among the most distinctive and recognizable presences in contemporary Southwest art.Gene Tobey was a sculptor working in raku pottery when Rebecca first encountered his work in 1984, while serving as director of a Santa Fe gallery that featured his ceramics. They married in 1985 and began developing their collaborative practice together, evolving from functional ceramics into the stylized animal sculptures that would define their shared legacy. Rebecca was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the daughter of a painter and a scientist who later chaired the National Cancer Institute. Her upbringing combined a deep affinity for animals and the natural world with exposure to opera, great art museums, and the Boston Symphony. She arrived in Santa Fe in 1975, drawn by an immediate and lasting sense of belonging, and the city has been her home and artistic center ever since.The Art of Gene and Rebecca TobeyThe Tobeys created their own symbolic language, drawing on Native American imagery and their own shared experience as its source. Their sculptures present bears, bison, elk, birds of prey, and human-animal combinations in dynamic, timeless attitudes that express the dominant personality of each form. Viewed from a distance, the works read as sleek, powerful silhouettes; up close, their surfaces reveal an intricate maze of sgraffito drawings, carved and painted glyphs depicting animals, mountain ranges, starry skies, human figures, and geometric symbols. The bison was a particularly significant canvas for the Tobeys, its substantial form providing space for richly glazed and matte-finished surfaces alive with painted mesas, running horses, soaring eagles, and their signature wolves and southwestern dragons.Rebecca Tobey and a Continuing LegacyGene Tobey died in 2006. Rebecca has continued the work, extending what was always a union of two minds and hearts into a single voice that carries both presences forward. Her most celebrated public commissions include Pathfinder, a six-foot bronze grizzly installed at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado in 1994, and Spirit Walker, a monumental fifteen-foot bear contributed to Baylor University in 2000, its surface engraved with the history of Waco, Texas. Rebecca currently shows in Sedona, Vail, Red Lodge, and Santa Fe, where she works from her home studio.