Latest news with #sculpture
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Is Planning a 'Garden of American Heroes' For the Country's Anniversary. Sculpture Experts Say It'll Never Happen.
There's a big problem with Donald Trump's signature plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. And, for once, it has nothing to do with culture-war bickering about just who should be included in the national statue display. Instead, artists, curators and critics who have reviewed the recent request for proposals have a more practical worry: America doesn't have enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen on Trump's speedy timeline. 'It seems completely unworkable,' said Daniel Kunitz, editor of Sculpture magazine. It's nothing if not ambitious. The plan is to unveil 250 life-sized statues in time for the nation's 250th birthday next year on July 4. Having decimated large chunks of the federal arts bureaucracy, the administration has reoriented much of what's left to the $34 million outdoor park project, a singular Trump goal since his first term. 'It's going to be something very extraordinary,' Trump told a White House audience in February. 'We're going to produce some of the most beautiful works of art.' According to one of several executive orders on the idea, it's all meant to 'reflect the awesome splendor of our country's timeless exceptionalism.' Unfortunately, the schedule all but guarantees something less than awesome, splendid or timeless. And, quite possibly, something less than American, too: The fine print forbids 'abstract or modernist' statues, and the biggest collection of artisans and fabricators working in Trump's preferred old-school realist style turns out to be in China, not the U.S. 'You'd be flooding the capacity of artists in this country who do that kind of stuff, and the capacity of foundries,' said Dylan Farnum, who for years ran the Walla Walla Foundry, a fine-art powerhouse that is one of the best-regarded such facilities in America. 'There are places where you can really whip some stuff off. They can do it in China.' Many U.S. fine-art foundries are booked anywhere from six to 18 months in advance. There also aren't many of them: The International Sculpture Center's list numbers 69. Though technology has sped things up — these days, you can 3D-print a model before casting it — faster production often involves partnering with Chinese or other foreign facilities. At best, such collaborations can lead to a usable statue at a good price. But if the work is slapdash and uninspired, the likeness can feel more like a cheap mannequin than a national monument. 'It doesn't yield the quality we're usually looking for,' said Andrew Pharmer, who runs a large fine art foundry in Kingston, New York. 'If you're physically sculpting something you get detail down to the level of a fingerprint. There's just nothing digital in my experience that can do that.' One wag likened Trump's project to a government-run version of Madame Tussaud's wax museum: Possibly enticing to tourists, but by no means awe-inspiring. The White House didn't respond to detailed questions about the schedule or the use of foreign facilities. 'The National Garden of American Heroes will be a beautiful monument to the spirit of America,' a spokesperson said. Even without worrying about trans-Pacific shipping (and new tariffs), the timeline is tight. The feds have yet to assign statues to sculptors. The application deadline is July 1, just 368 days before America's 250th. Applicants are supposed to pick 10 or 20 names from Trump's list of historic heroes; the National Endowment for the Humanities will then let winners know who they're supposed to sculpt. That won't happen until late September, cutting it still closer. The delivery date is June 1, 2026. It's also not clear who will apply. Low opinions of Trump in the artistic community could dissuade some applicants. And while the commissions are $200,000 per statue, it seems less lavish when you consider the costs of casting and base material, which the administration says must be marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass. (In 2022, Arkansas dedicated $750,000 to create bronze statues of singer Johnny Cash and civil rights hero Daisy Bates for the U.S. Capitol.) Because many prominent U.S. sculptors don't do traditional figurative work, the artists vying for commissions may also have less experience in prestige projects. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for traditionalists who hope to elevate artists who deploy classical styles. But it increases the odds of a schedule-busting snafu. 'It's easy to AI-render a Dick Van Dyke sculpture,' Farnum told me. 'So much easier than actually getting it done.' There's a reason sculpture commissions, even in an age of computer modeling and robotic chiseling, can take years. Particularly when the subjects are deceased, the challenges involve finding an image, creating scale models, sculpting the final mold, casting a life-size statue, and then transporting the very heavy end product and overseeing its installation. On top of that, public art tends to involve a lot of collaboration and feedback from whoever is commissioning the work — a diplomatic dance that further slows things down. 'You put out an RFP and then there's just a long period working with the institutions,' said Kunitz. 'A year is highly unlikely.' It's hard to imagine a Trump-appointed leadership waiving its right to review whatever some artist cooks up. The NEH also didn't respond to a request for comment. And then there's the location of the garden: There isn't one. The plan calls for a suitable space to be identified. That hasn't happened yet, though the governor of South Dakota has offered a spot in the Black Hills near Mount Rushmore. Assuming the space works, it will still have to be acquired, cleared, and prepared for a vast collection of statues and (they hope) an even more vast collection of visitors. The shadow of Rushmore would surely suit the politics of the project. First announced amid the protests of 2020, the garden was a neat bit of ideological positioning: Where the left wanted to tear down statues, Trump said, he was celebrating America without apology. His executive order featured a long list of subjects including Patrick Henry, Sojourner Truth, Mark Twain, Eleanor Roosevelt, Muhammad Ali, William Rehnquist, Whitney Houston and Steve Jobs. Inevitably, the controversial roster of statue subjects has gotten lots of attention. Trump's list includes a few figures whose records on race made them targets, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson and John James Audubon. Others sniff that its array of conservative intellectuals (Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley Jr., Jeane Kirkpatrick) is more robust than its collection of left-leaning thinkers. And there are also some downright strange choices, such as the Canadian-born Jeopardy host Alex Trebek. But all too typically for our era of permanent culture war, the political fury has distracted attention from the basic logistics of the plan — and from the question of whether the end product would, as a simple matter of aesthetics, be worthy of a great country. In the fine-arts world, the answer to that latter question seems to be: Nope. 'It doesn't seem to be very serious,' Kunitz said. 'It's sort of trolling.' It's a classic artistic divide for a populist age: Should a project aim for mass appeal, a spot for Instagram selfies and zany poses? Or should it — as conservative cultural critics have long insisted — seek to be a lasting masterwork of civilization? Trump's entire career gives a pretty good indication of what his administration's answer would be, no matter how eloquently they may talk about creating a testament to American greatness. 'It's a circus mentality, and he's a showman,' said Ken Lum, a sculptor and University of Pennsylvania professor who has created major public monuments in the naturalist style. Lum says he's not optimistic about the garden's political impact, but thinks it could actually be popular if the administration manages to get it done — like a roadside attraction, if not a monument for the ages. 'For a lot of people going to Mount Rushmore, there will be public bathrooms and concession stands and souvenirs, and you could have your picture taken with Babe Ruth or MLK or whoever.'
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Taupo dinosaur statue 'Boom Boom' explodes online
life and society arts about 1 hour ago Boom Boom, the Taupo dinosaur, is exploding on social media after a rocky start with some rate payers. The near ten metre tall dinosaur scuplture sitting on a large geometric rock is the town's latest attraction. The scultpture first gained attention after the council contributed a one off grant of one hundred thousand dollars, while residents are facing a rates increase of more than eight percent. Now Boom Boom is attracting international attention online. Taupo Mayor David Tewavas spoke to Lisa Owen.
CTV News
2 days ago
- General
- CTV News
‘Perfect is good enough': Husband and wife sculptors reflect on 54 years of work
The statue is getting freshened up before being moved to Edmonton's new arena. Kevin Green has more. 'Perfect is good enough': Husband and wife sculptors reflect on 54 years of work It's been a relationship forged in bronze. Don Begg and his wife Shirley have worked side-by-side for 54 years at Studio West Bronze Foundry & Art Gallery, their vast space in Cochrane, Alta., northwest of Calgary. Their combined works include 160 statues on display throughout Canada, the United States, Germany and France. Hundreds of other smaller pieces have been created for private collectors. 'She'll get in there and do anything that is possible. She'll work on one leg on one side and I'll work on the other leg on the other side. We've worked together for all of our life,' Begg told The Canadian Press in an interview. Among those are the 430-kilogram bronze statue of hockey great Wayne Gretzky holding the Stanley Cup over his head. That piece was on display at Rexall Place in Edmonton and then given a facelift before being placed downtown at Rogers Place, now the Oilers' home arena. Wayne Gretzky statue Statues of Wayne Gretzky sit outside the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre in Brantford, Ont., on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013. (Lee Boyadjian / CTV Kitchener) Their most recent high-profile creation was a 2 1/2-metre bronze rifleman, weighing 450-kilograms, dedicated to the soldiers from the Royal Regina Rifles. It was unveiled by Princess Anne in June at la Place des Canadiens in Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse in France, near the beaches of Normandy. It took nine months to complete and cost $300,000. 'It was a real honour to be asked to do it and when the fella phoned and said 'Are you interested?' I didn't even think about it for more than a millionth of a second. I said, 'Absolutely. We're in,'' Begg said. 'What we kind of specialize in is realistic sculptures.' The massive model of the rifleman, covered with an inch of clay over a metal frame, sits in the workshop. Others include a First World War soldier and the first immigrants to Western Canada represented by a man in a bowler hat, a woman in a fancy hat, a boy and a girl with pigtails. The couple has also specialized in creating Indigenous figures, including a more than three-metre statue of Sitting Eagle, the chief of the Stoney First Nation, in downtown Calgary. Begg says he is equally proud of all their works. 'They're all favourites. You learn something about every piece and we do bronze work that's going to last for a thousand years, so you always want to do your very best that you can because you won't be around forever to make excuses,' he said with a chuckle. 'There's no redo' Shirley Begg said they won't ever settle for second-best. 'Perfect is good enough. Actually if you were here all day you would hear that perfect is good enough,' she said. 'There's no seconds. There's no redo. Perfect is what we aim for and it's the only thing that is acceptable.' In the forge itself, a molten brew of brass ingots bubbles in the crucible before the lava-like liquid is carefully poured into the ceramic shell of the statue. It's backbreaking work but Begg said with the use of cranes attached to the ceiling he's still managing. 'Maybe another 25 years,' he said. 'Maybe 30. No desire to retire.' Other works include identical statues of Northwest Mounted Police Commissioner James Macleod in both Calgary and Ottawa, four larger-than-life statues of four fallen RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe, Alta. and one depicting Nellie McClung circa 1929, as a member of the 'Famous Five' who endeavoured to make women 'persons' under the law. Begg is to receive the Alberta Order of Excellence in October to celebrate women and men 'who have contributed so much for the greater good.' 'When they talk about we have about four million people in Alberta they only have about 220 of quite an honour in itself. I'm looking forward to it,' he said. But in the meantime, he has plenty to do before that happens. 'Probably have about 80 bronzes on order right now so we just keeping plugging away.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published August 25, 2024.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights
I feel like I've stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise. Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread's Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape. Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres. In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That's no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don't so much ponder mortality as silently scream. House, the famous, lost masterpiece that won Whiteread the 1993 Turner prize, also once stood in the open air, as ungainly and insistent against an east London sky as these remorseless objects look in a much more tranquil context. It was demolished in a culture war that's forgotten now, but Whiteread is no sensationalist. Her art hits you for a moment with harsh modernism, but then – unless you refuse to look and feel, as the local council did – its sombre poetry creeps up on you. Down and Up is cast from an old staircase in a synagogue in Bethnal Green, east London. You can see why these stairs fascinate her: they are curiously narrow and sloped, as if pushed out of shape by multitudes of long-gone feet. Odd, baffling details like this give her art warmth and passion, while the blank masses of cast material, in this case grey concrete, fill it with silence and terror. You can't care about life, her art suggests, without recognising death. She sees ghosts everywhere. Her exhibition launches the Goodwood Art Foundation. In its low-slung, partly glass-walled gallery, Whiteread's eye for decay and loss infects a new series of brightly coloured but emotionally serious photographs. Wherever she goes, in Essex or Italy, Whiteread in these pictures sees the crack in the teacup, the rusty stain on the mosaic floor. She notices bin bags like shrouds, a rotting community centre that refuses to be picturesque. Sometimes their foreboding is a bit false, even descending into bathos. We can all be spooked by crows gathering on a telephone wire and sometimes an abandoned child's toy is just that, however wretched it looks on the doorstep. Yet this is how Whiteread's imagination works: she sees a continuum between everyday melancholia and collective grief. In 2023, she had a show in Bergamo, Italy – which was severely hit by Covid – creating tombstone-like sculptures to mourn the lost. Some are here. Based on casts of the spaces under chairs – a favourite Whiteread motif – they are marked by recesses where legs and struts once were. She aspires to public monuments yet also flees into secret recesses of introspection and memory – which is why a pastoral landscape is such a resonant setting for her art. Two photographs in the gallery show rotting, abandoned places, a shed and a caravan, in each of which someone seems to have lived a hermitic existence, but these shelters rust and rot away, surrendering to weeds. In front of them she recreates this spectacle of solitude and dissolution in her sculpture Doppelgänger, a reconstruction of a smashed, forgotten shack, its broken walls pierced by fallen branches, painted in white emulsion, a ghostly covering that with brilliant simplicity makes reality metamorphosise into art. Outside in the woods, at the end of a long, narrow vista, she has placed a concrete cast of a sealed shed, its windows opaque, its door closed for ever. You feel more and more alone walking around it, trying to find the way in. It is called Detached II. This is a poem to solitude and here in the garden, surrounded by unruly spring growth, it feels as eccentric and lost as the rotting caravan and shack in her photographs. Dissolution and decay are part of nature. They are also part of our lives and time's arrow only points one way. Thoughts like these are not consoling but they feel as if they belong in the woods, like intoxicating mushrooms of melancholy. Whiteread is a great modern artist and her sculptures blight this pastoral, beautifully. Rachel Whiteread's exhibition is at Goodwood Art Foundation from 31 May to 2 November
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
'I Practice Drawing Blindfolded': Meet Sculptor Joanna Allen
Sculptor Joanna Allen creating "psychomorphs" in her Dorset studio Poetry is at its most successful when it expresses the feelings we struggle to voice. How often are we stuck for the right words, stumbling through sentences like we're grasping in the dark, trying to give colour and shape to our emotions... only to read a line that so perfectly sums up our experience it feels like the writer has reached through time and space and plucked it straight out of our hearts? Such talent is rare, but speaking to the most profound layers of our humanity is not solely the preserve of wordsmiths. Joanna Allen is a sculptor and visual artist whose work gives body to some of our most complex emotions, from safety to self-love. Bowman Sculpture, a gallery in St James's, London, that deals with 19th century to contemporary sculpture, presented Joanna Allen's debut solo exhibition in May 2025, titled Subconscious Playground. It's a show that the artist and gallery have been working on together for over four years. Joanna Allen and Mica Bowman attend a private view of "Subconscious Playground", the debut solo exhibition by sculptor Joanna Allen, at Bowman Sculpture on April 30, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Alan Chapman/) 'My mother, Michele Bowman, has an incredible eye,' shares director, Mica Bowman. 'She brought artists like Hanneke Beaumont and Helaine Blumenfeld into the gallery when she founded the contemporary side of Bowman Sculpture a little over twenty years ago, with my father Robert Bowman.' It was a friend of hers that initially shared Allen's Instagram profile, 'then my mum sent it to me, saying, 'you need to see this.'' Mica Bowman was captivated. 'Something about the work instantly resonated. I rarely take on new artists, as the gallery program is already very full and we're a relatively small operation. But with Joanna Allen, I immediately asked to discuss representation.' Allen is the kind of rare find that dealers dream of. 'As anyone in the art world will tell you,' Bowman adds, 'it's incredibly rare to find someone who feels genuinely original. Allen has that thing, that mad genius quality where creativity just pours out of her.' "Horizon" by Joanna Allen, polished brzone with charcoal patina With a background in graphic design and art direction, Allen left this commercial world in 2016 to fully focus on her own practice. A period of intense training followed: with Simon Cooley in the UK, Eudald De Juana and Robert Bodem at the Florence Academy of Art and Grzegorz Gwiazda at the Barcelona Academy of Art. 'This was crucial,' Allen explains, 'it helped me develop a strong foundation in understanding the figure and mastering the intricacies of form.' Subconscious Playground is testament to the talent she has finely tuned over these past years. Although this is her first show, Allen's artistic trajectory has already passed through several phases—all of which are represented. Figurative and abstract works both feature, and occasionally seem to be in dialogue. The globular segments of the abstract piece, Complexing, could be a kind of smudging, a devolving, of the pregnant and engorged curvilinear silhouette of an earlier figurative sculpture, Monument. (L) "Monument" and (R) "Complexing" both in bronze Heads are a recurrent theme— which feels apt, given Allen's cerebral nature. In fact, she is so rigorously analytical, that her latest experiments in making have sought to shut this part off completely. 'I practice drawing blindfolded during meditation, to counterbalance the deliberate process of modelling figurative works,' she shares. While in this state, Allen creates marks she's dubbed 'psychomorphs'. 'This method allows me to access a deeper part of myself, one that lies beyond the constraints of conscious perception,' she explains. These sketches, mainlined from her psyche, have been 'revelatory' to her practice, and are the starting points that underpin her abstract works. "Shadow" by Joanna Allen, bronze with charcoal patina Most of her figurative heads function as metaphors for big ideas that lead us down introspective alleyways. The sculpture Shadow is at first glance a face with a fringe or visor shading the eyes, but upon closer inspection, it's an adult cranium sitting like horse's blinkers atop the head of a smaller child. Allen was harnessing childhood memories of feeling insubstantial around adults, though the piece also raises questions of how grown-ups can narrow a child's outlook, or how we can armour ourselves against psychological onslaughts. Consumption Pattern is formed of two identical bronze heads balanced together almost as though they were looking into each other's eyes. It's intimate, with the title seemingly asking us to confront our vanities, or the masks we wear. As Bowman sums up, 'the subject matters are layered, psychologically complex.' The artist's choice to keep eyes lowered or closed in many of the heads emphasises the reflective, inward-looking element prompted by the titles. "Consumption Pattern" in the window of Bowman Sculpture This, alongside Allen's sheer skill in reproducing physiognomy, results in an emotional depth so intense it is uncomfortable at times. These are works that worm their way under your skin and gnaw at the anxieties, tensions and little fears that live there. They feel personal to Allen, and somehow, she also reaches into our shared human experience, of being a child in an adult's world for instance, drawing out these memories that live in each of us, and holding them up to the light. And yet, Allen's oeuvre never crosses over into the distressing, monstrous or shocking. With her strong foundation in figurative sculpting, she is able to articulate conceptual ideas through traditional techniques which make her work, for want of a better phrase, simply beautiful. It is this, I believe, that creates the emotional, answering echoes between her work and her audience. There are two pieces in the exhibition that make use of installation and new media; a decision that intrigued me, given the gallery's focus on a classical approach to sculpture. The Observer and the Observed shows two chairs (a collaboration with textile artist Yuliya Surnina) positioned to face each other in a dimly lit room, with an audio of Allen's voice. 'It invites the viewer directly into her creative space,' explains Bowman, 'it asks you to try and find that same internal stillness she draws from, to imagine what it's like to sit in that chair, hold the brush to the canvas, eyes closed, and create with nothing but the vast, uncharted space of your subconscious to guide you. It's quietly powerful.' This is a clever bit of curation that encourages visitors to get to know Allen, still an emerging artist, beyond her sculptures. 'I was just there to guide how the work could be communicated to an audience. There was a natural understanding between us—she created a language and somehow, I already knew how to speak it,' says Bowman. "Psychomorph" painting that evolved into the sculpture "Afterimage" And yet the preparation for this show must not be underestimated. When first introduced to the gallery, none of Allen's pieces had been cast in bronze. 'They were made from builder's plaster,' Bowman shares, 'which is unusual. Most artists would work in a specific sculptor's plaster, but this felt very true to her—unconventional, instinctive, and completely unique.' In the years it took to put together the exhibition, Allen worked closely with the foundry to produce patinas, including creating an extraordinary translucent patina that allows the original bronze to show through before fading into more traditional brown or black finishes. 'Bronze carries a significance that goes beyond its aesthetic appeal,' Allen says, 'It has been a medium for millennia and connects my work to that rich lineage of artists and artisans who have come before me.' "Afterimage" by Joanna Allen, polished bronze Beyond the material, Allen's work is already being positioned within art history and some of its more powerful legacies. Her preoccupation with the inner workings of the mind have seen her dubbed a 'contemporary Surrealist'. The parallels are there: Allen's 'psychomorphs' are reminiscent of Surrealist automatic writing, and she is undeniably concerned with psychology. It is particularly fitting that Allen's solo show debuted just after the centenary of Surrealism in 2024, marking a hundred years since André Breton penned the movement's manifesto. Yet Allen does not quite have the profile of one of Surrealism's enfant terribles, with their sexual dreamscapes and overt political ripostes. As Bowman notes, 'her work sits within the legacy of Surrealism, yes, but the ideas she explores—and the way she expresses them—are truly her own.' Allen's work feels more contained; she is plumbing the depths of her own psyche and traveling inward, seeing how far she can go. Therein is her 'subconscious playground' of the exhibition's title. 'All my works are anchored in the question of what makes us us. Cindy Sherman does this really well. Her work is a brilliant visual exploration that brings us closer to understanding what it feels like to exist.' In fact, no art genre grafts very neatly onto Allen. But if I had to draw a comparison, perhaps I would enlist Wassily Kandinsky. Considered the father of abstractionism, his metaphysical tract, Concerning the Spiritual in Art argues that art should communicate inner meaning, while artists should work in response to 'internal necessity', answering a calling to create. This feels very much in the spirit of Allen, who's primary compulsion is so obviously to make. 'I remember visiting her studio and realizing we'd need to cut works to streamline the exhibition. There was simply too much—too many ideas, too much material—for one show. Honestly, there was enough for a full retrospective at the Tate, and that's exactly where I see her work heading,' says Bowman. 'Subconscious Playground' is on view at Bowman Sculpture until the 30th of May 2025.
