Paul Bunyan

Paul Bunyan is a folk hero of the logging camps; the university's park director describes this one as older and tired. Tony Tasset's “Paul” (2006) is a 30-foot painted-fibreglass figure over a steel frame, and the university's collection record lists it as commissioned by the Art-in-Architecture Program of the Illinois Capital Development Board. The park's own history places it as the last of the 2002 commissions, delivered in 2006, after the university began working with the board's Percent for Art Program in 2000. The Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park was formally established by the university's trustees in 1978 and traces its beginnings to Mark di Suvero's work on the site in 1968 to 1969. In 2019 the university described Paul as standing in full view of the Prairie Place residence centre.

Others have offered readings of Tasset's Paul. Park director Jeff Stevenson told FOX 32 Chicago in 2021 that Tasset presented “a Paul Bunyan that is older, and tired and his work is catching up with him”. In a 2014 Southtown Star article, Geoffrey Bates, then director and curator of the park, read the figure differently: Bunyan is bearing the burden of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Bates said; that is the curator's interpretation as reported, not a statement from the artist. A profile on the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum's Life During Wartime exhibition site calls it a despondent Paul Bunyan that “pays sad tribute to manifest destiny”.