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2025 Cut/Paste Publication Feature

Gina Louise ’94 makes sculpture on a grand scale, from recreating the geology of Russia’s eastern coast, to crafting stands of quaking aspen that really quake, just like nature intended. As the lead exhibit designer, sculptor, and painter at the Minnesota Zoo, with a C.V. of special commissions from around the country, Louise is known for building hyper-realistic natural habitats that can stand up to close viewing from zoo visitors, not to mention the daily pounding of gorillas, tigers, and bears.

“I had no idea this was even a job when I was at 51���Ϲ���, but it’s the best STEAM job I can imagine, with engineering and creative problem-solving every day,” she says. “I get paid to use my hands. I get paid to use my brain. Basically, I get paid to play.”

Louise had an interest in art from an early age, and entered 51���Ϲ��� at sixteen as a Post-Secondary Enrollment Option student, submitting a seven-pound hat as part of her portfolio. (“That was sculpture, though I didn’t know it at the time,” she says.) She credits faculty members and respected sculptors Mike Bigger and Kinji Akagawa ’68 for their critique-based classroom process to help her learn from feedback. It’s a skill that served her well after graduation, when she was hired to create immersive jungle decor for the Rainforest Cafe restaurants, and fabricate flora and fauna for Disney’s Animal Kingdom park. Her big career break came when her art school background helped her land a job building the Bronx Zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest, a habitat setting so realistic the design lead expected her to explain the biological and geologic process behind every rock face she carved. “I worked on that project for two and a half years, and learned most everything that I’ve had in my toolbelt for the last thirty years,” she says.

Convincingly building lifelike trees, from bark to branch, has become a specialty for Louise, whose father planted several hundred trees each year while converting farmland into a forest outside of Afton, Minnesota. “That’s probably one reason why making sure every part of the tree is scientifically accurate is important to me,” she says. “But it’s also part of the fun.”

While she’s just one of a handful of tree builders in the business, she’s often one of the only women on a construction site. “I’m about five feet tall, but I get treated like the big sister because I bust my butt just as hard as the guys do,” she says about projects requiring her to build a life-size Sitka spruce inside Alaska’s Denali Visitor Center, or a foundation for the Russia’s Grizzly Coast habitat at the Minnesota Zoo by blasting 500,000 square feet of concrete through a pneumatic hose. “There’s nothing I love more than a construction site.”

Right now, Louise is recreating the Himalayan foothills for a new habitat she hopes will keep the zoo’s red pandas as comfortable as possible during Minnesota’s steamy summer months. “They don’t like temperatures higher than seventy-five degrees,” says Louise, who has found a way to disguise solar-powered cooling units in moss-covered logs, which will provide heat relief and a little enrichment for the pandas. Louise asks, “You know that quote, ‘If you want to draw a bird, you’ve got to be a bird’? That’s how I feel about all of the things I create.”