Roanoke trustee Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo ’78 is in the news for her connection to widely-reported sightings of a giant flying iguana in Fort Worth, Texas. The bizarre voyage was actually a helicopter transport of a 2,600 pound and 40-foot sculpture to a rooftop at the Fort Worth Zoo.
‘Iggy,’ as the sculpture is named, was created 32 years ago for an art exhibition by Cassullo’s artist friend Bob ‘Daddy-O’ Wade. After the exhibition, it was transported to the famed Lone Star Café in New York City, where it perched upon its roof for 13 years. When the café closed, the sculpture was bought by a Virginia couple, who moved it to their horse farm and “put it out to pasture” on the training course. Eventually, when the farm was sold, Wade bought back his creation and contacted Cassullo, whose private foundation funded Iggy’s restoration. Cassullo found a home for Iggy at the Manhattan Youth Community Center on Pier 25 on the Hudson River.
A few years later, Iggy had to move again due to renovations at the pier. He was purchased by the husband of Fort Worth Zoo board member Ramona Bass and stored in a barn for a number of years. When the Fort Worth Zoo developed its new herpetarium, The Museum of Living Art, in 2007, Bass and Wade knew that Iggy had a reason to surface from retirement, especially given his resemblance to species inside the museum. Iggy was recently spruced up once more so that he could take his current post to promote the zoo’s new herpetarium. Although it’s been some time since Cassullo first rescued Iggy, Wade says, in The Dallas Morning News, “Without Joanne, the iguana would be sitting atop a coal mine somewhere.”
Fanciful subjects seem to be a favorite of both Cassullo’s and Wade’s. Cassullo donated the John Margolies photographs of quirky roadside architecture that adorn the Colket Center walls, and the Olin Gallery owns a Wade portrait of Roanoke art critic, the late Ann Weinstein, whimsically portrayed as a cowgirl atop a white horse.
