The tools haven't changed much in a few thousand years. A hammer, a punch, a sheet of metal, and a steady hand — that's the whole kit. And that, more or less, is the point of a workshop coming to the National Museum of Wildlife Art on October 3, when the Michigan metal artist Ivan Iler will teach a room of beginners how to chase wildlife into metal.
Chasing is the art of creating design on metal from the front side, working the surface with tools to push and shape it. Its close cousin, repoussé, is the same idea worked from the back, raising the metal up into relief. The two techniques are often used together, and together they account for some of the most durable objects human hands have ever made. The museum's own description of the class notes that hammered metal has decorated everything from the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to the Statue of Liberty, and that despite every technological advance since, the craft itself has barely budged. A chased surface is still made the way it was made in antiquity: one blow at a time, with the metal held against a yielding surface and the artist listening for the right ring.
That continuity is part of what makes the class unusual. Most art workshops teach a medium that is a few centuries old at most. This one teaches a technique whose basic grammar predates the printing press by millennia.
The instructor is an unlikely heir to that tradition. Ivan Iler is a Michigan-based artist best known for larger-than-life kinetic metal sculptures, work that moves — powered by gears, magnets, air currents, water, gravity, or the direct hand of a viewer. His first works of art were custom motorcycles, which he began fabricating as a teenager. He ran his own motorcycle fabrication shop before transitioning into sculpture, and he built a reputation in Michigan for massive public metal pieces around the state and for repeated wins at ScrapFest, an annual Lansing-area competition in which artists make work from scrap metal. He appeared on the Netflix competition series Metal Shop Masters, an experience he has credited with taking his career to another level, and he has since worked as a brand ambassador for the industrial cutting-equipment maker Hypertherm, appearing at trade shows around the country. His studio describes him as a jack of many trades — metal fabrication, sculpting, carving, engraving, blacksmithing, painting, leatherwork — and he is a board member of Arts in the Wild.
The class is tied to a larger exhibition. Art in Motion: Kinetic Sculpture with Ivan Iler is on view at the museum from May 28 through October 4, 2026, and it fills both the indoor galleries and the outdoor Sculpture Trail, where two monumental Iler works, African Elephant and Unicorn, stand along the path. The exhibition also includes kinetic work by other contemporary artists drawn from the museum's permanent collection and from a community call for art, and visitors are encouraged to find instructions inviting them to safely set certain sculptures in motion themselves. For the first half hour of the October 3 class, Iler will walk participants through his work in the galleries. Then the group moves to the classroom, where the hammers come out.
The setting is fitting in more ways than one. The National Museum of Wildlife Art opened originally as the Wildlife of the American West Art Museum in a three-gallery, 5,000-square-foot storefront on Jackson's Town Square. It outgrew that space by 1992 and eventually moved to its current home, built into a hillside overlooking the National Elk Refuge, two and a half miles north of the Town Square and two miles from the gateway of Grand Teton National Park. Congress designated it the "National Museum of Wildlife Art of the United States" in 2008. Its collection of more than 5,000 artworks includes pieces by Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, John James Audubon, and Carl Rungius — the last of whom gives the museum's address, Rungius Road, its name.
The workshop is part of the museum's Make it Wild series, which brings regional professional artists in to teach a new medium to adults and young adults of beginner to intermediate ability. The series has a philanthropic engine behind it: registration fees support the museum's Art Leadership Scholarship in Honor of the Memory of Dick Jennings, a $4,000 award given annually to a Teton County high school senior who plans to study art at the college level. Jennings was a museum board member, and the museum frames the scholarship as an extension of his memory — an encouragement, in its words, to pursue our passions. Past recipients have included students like Lucinda Harger, a Jackson Hole High School senior and Art Association of Jackson Hole assistant teacher who won the award in 2021 and went on to study art therapy.
The October class runs from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the museum's Wapiti Gallery and classroom, costs $60, and is capped at 20 participants. No prior knowledge or skill is required, and everyone leaves with a finished piece of metal-chased wildlife artwork of their own. It is, by the standards of a museum class, a fairly intimate encounter with a very old idea — that a flat, cold sheet of metal can be persuaded, with patience and a hammer, to hold the shape of something alive.
That persuasion is the real subject of the day. Iler's own work is defined by motion, by sculptures that refuse to sit still, and chasing is in some sense its opposite: a way of freezing a gesture into a rigid surface. But the two share a premise. Both depend on understanding how a material wants to move, and both reward the maker who can feel it rather than force it. For three hours in early October, in a gallery full of animals rendered in paint and bronze, a small group will learn to do it in metal — the same way it has been done since the pharaohs.