As Fry's reputation increased, so did his opportunities for commissioned sculpture, especially commemorative statues, fountains and reliefs. His earliest public commission was a bronze statue of Mahaska, the 19th-century leader of a Native American tribe called the Ioway. Recently restored, it still stands on its pedestal in the town square of Oskaloosa, which is the county seat of Mahaska County, Iowa, in the southeastern section of the state. At the right of the base is the artist's signature "S.E. Fry, 1907". When he accepted the Mahaska commission in 1906, Fry was living in Paris. He returned to Iowa the following summer to make preparatory drawings of Meskwaki at the nearby Settlement at Tama, Iowa, and to collect Indian artifacts and other reference materials. Returning to Paris, he began on a clay scale model, which he first showed at the Paris Salon in 1907. A year later, he exhibited the final full-sized sculpture, for which he was awarded the Prix de Rome. Soon after, it was shipped to the U.S., and arrived in Oskaloosa by railroad in September. The formal dedication of the statue, which was attended by a crowd of about 12,000 people, was held on May 12, 1909.
When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Fry saw a news photograph of camouflage created by artists serving in the French Army. He showed it to a friend, New Hampshire painter Barry Faulkner, who was a cousin of Abbott Handerson Thayer, and a former student of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. By this time, both the French and the British had officially set up units of camouflage specialists called "camoufleurs", many of whom were artists, architects and stage designers. Working together, Fry and Faulkner organized meetings with artists and government officials, in the hope of beginning an American camouflage unit. Soon after, in 1917, the U.S. Army did set up an American Camouflage Corps, and Fry and Faulkner were among the first enlistees. The two men chosen to lead that organization were Homer Saint-Gaudens and Evarts Tracy, the New York architect who had co-designed the Missouri State Capitol building, and would later hire Sherry Fry to create Ceres for the dome. This camouflage unit set sail for France on New Year's Day in 1918. A month later, Fry and Faulkner were sent to the front lines, where their primary responsibility was the camouflage of artillery positions. Years later, Faulkner recalled Fry's and his own war experiences in several radio talks and an autobiography. Sherry Fry, said Faulkner, "had little sense of fear and less of discipline." He also "had an insatiable curiosity" and "resented taking orders." He defied regulations and went out alone in abandoned trenches, looking for enemy helmets, belt buckles and other souvenirs. These forays became his chief preoccupation, Faulkner recalled, and before long he was transferred to Chantilly, where because he was fluent in French he became an American liaison to the French camouflage unit.
Later years
In the years following World War I, Fry did not succeed in becoming the prominent American sculptor that, at one time, he seemed destined for. His work is rarely mentioned now, in part because he and other around the start of the 20th century sculptors began to look outdated in comparison to experiments in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and other forms of Modern Art. During the later years of his life, he worked out of his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he died in 1966.
