If you flip through a 1946 University of Missouri football program, you’ll find a young Columbia woman named Sabra Tull Meyer on the cover — that year’s MU Homecoming Queen. It’s a nice bit of trivia. What makes it a story is what she did with the seven decades that followed.
The Boone County Historical Society recently received a copy of that 1946 souvenir program, donated by Ellen Dugger, according to the [Boone County History & Culture Center](https://boonehistory.org/1946-mu-homecoming-queen-sabra-tull-meyer/). It’s a small artifact, but it’s the thread connecting a college homecoming tradition to a genuinely significant Missouri art career.
Meyer, a Hickman High School graduate, went on to earn three degrees from MU — a bachelor’s in 1964, a master’s in 1968, and a master of fine arts in 1970, according to her [Columbia Missourian obituary](https://www.columbiamissourian.com/obituaries/missourian_life_story/sabra-tull-meyer-remembered-for-renowned-work-in-sculpture/article_dff86f94-d7a7-11ed-b8b4-67b728f1b015.html). She spent more than 30 years working in bronze, and her sculptures ended up in some genuinely prominent places: the Missouri State Capitol’s Hall of Famous Missourians, where she sculpted busts including Dale Carnegie and Edwin Hubble, and Jefferson Landing State Historic Site, where her Corps of Discovery monument — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, York, George Drouillard, and the dog Seaman, cast eight feet tall and weighing 5,000 pounds — has stood since a 2007 [Missouri Secretary of State’s office](https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/presentations/default/sabra) presentation on her work.
Closer to home, her pieces are scattered across the MU campus near the School of Journalism, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Bond Life Sciences Center, and the Museum of Art and Archaeology, per the Missourian. Columbia residents have likely walked past her work without knowing it — at the Columbia Public Library, at Hickman High School, and in the 56-foot sculptural mural at the Missouri Theatre.
She taught for years at Stephens College and William Woods University in Fulton, and was honored with MU’s Alumni Award in 2008 and induction into the Boone County Hall of Fame in 2020. Meyer died in April 2023 at age 82. Her youngest daughter told the Missourian she was “compassionate, incredibly intelligent and the queen of multitasking” — a description that tracks for someone who spent decades researching period dress and using historical re-enactors as models to get her bronze figures right.
It’s easy to walk the halls of a familiar building and never look twice at the art on the wall or the statue in the courtyard. The next time you’re on MU’s campus or downtown Columbia, it’s worth a second look — there’s a decent chance it’s one of hers.
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