Christian Petersen’s legacy will extend to a new audience as a bronze casting of one of his well-known sculptures will be featured in a Kansas City museum this February.

The bronze casting of Petersen’s “Cornhusker” sculpture, created in 1941, was donated to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art collection in Kansas City over light jazz and appetizers at a “Thank You” reception in the Brunnier Art Museum Friday evening.

The expansion of Petersen’s work to other museums is an honor and a privilege, says Lynette Pohlman, director of university museums.

Pohlman says it is not as easy to get pieces into museums as it seems.

“It has to be core to their mission and core to their collection,” Pohlman says.

The sculpture — based on Marion Link, the 1940 Iowa cornhusking champion — was given to the museum to add more three-dimensional art and to give Petersen recognition as an artist of the Great Depression, says Randall Griffey, Nelson-Atkins’ American assistant art curator.

“We really do hope to round out, pun intended I guess, our American art collection,” Griffey says.

The museum’s American art collection reaches from colonial times to around 1940, and Petersen’s sculpture will be put in the context of art history at the “Bingham to Benton: The Midwest as Muse” exhibit beginning in February, which will also feature prints by Iowa artist Grant Wood.

Petersen’s work will be part of Midwestern art during the Great Depression.

One of the exhibit’s emphases is on the curved, surrealist landscapes of artist Thomas Hart Benton.

“[The sculpture] will be leading visitors into galleries of Benton’s contemporaries, of which Petersen is one,” Griffey says.

Petersen became Iowa State’s artist-in-residence as a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Work’s Progress Administration in 1935.

The sculpture is part of six bronze casts of “Cornhusker” made after Petersen’s death.

The original work, in a plaster cast, was intended to be in bronze, but wasn’t possible due to the economic disparity of the Depression, Pohlman says. One of the six bronze casts will remain at Brunnier for public viewing.

The casts also preserve the work, says Allison Sheridan, program assistant for university museums.

The plaster casting, which is also currently featured in the Brunnier, is brittle, and the bronze castings are more suitable for viewing in large museums.

“This makes it so it can be in public view and not under constant guard,” Sheridan says.

Sheridan says the lack of Petersen’s work in national museums comes from his work being mostly on campus and in private collections.

Another bronze cast of the sculpture was donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington in 1991, and other casts will be given to other museums in the future.