Traffic Frieze: Panel #7: Thou Shalt Not Covet

Vatican Casting Stone, directly applied and carved, 1981-2
frieze: 23 ft. long – each panel: 20” x 28” x 5”

Urban coveting of cars, partners and larger apartments.
The Ten Commandments as a traffic jam. Created for temporary public installation (with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) at 10 on 8: 10 display windows in a municipal garage on Eighth Avenue, NYC. Now in a corporate collection.

photo by Paul Warchol

Traffic Frieze: Panel #5: Thou Shalt Not Kill

Vatican Casting Stone, directly applied and carved, 1981-2
frieze: 23 ft. long – each panel: 20” x 28” x 5”

The Ten Commandments as a traffic jam. Created for temporary public installation (with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) at 10 on 8: 10 display windows in a municipal garage on Eighth Avenue, NYC. Now in a corporate collection.

photo by Paul Warchol

Traffic Frieze (detail, Panel #1: Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me)

Vatican Casting Stone, directly applied and carved, 1981-2
frieze: 23 ft. long – each panel: 20” x 28” x 5”

The Ten Commandments as a traffic jam. Created for temporary public installation (with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) at 10 on 8: 10 display windows in a municipal garage on Eighth Avenue, NYC. Now in a corporate collection.

photo by Paul Warchol

Traffic Frieze

Vatican Casting Stone, directly applied and carved, 1981-2
frieze: 23 ft. long – each panel: 20” x 28” x 5”

The Ten Commandments as a traffic jam. Created for temporary public installation (with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) at 10 on 8: 10 display windows in a municipal garage on 8th Avenue, NYC.  Now in a corporate collection.

photo by Paul Warchol

Growing Up 2

Aquaresin cast, edition of 8, 1992
60” x 72” x 1”

On either side, like portraits of donors in a medieval triptych, are two larger figures of a girl and boy trying to figure out how to grow up. In this section “Impatience” consults a clock that doesn’t help. It reads: After, Before, Then and Now.

Growing Up

Aquaresin cast, edition of 8, 1992
60” x 72” x 3”

An allegory of growing up, learning and creating. Below, small children are being trained to behave by adults who take the form of animals. Two trees provide a way to climb, through play, out of childhood into a world of imagination. There, children try on the wind and planets, slay difficult questions, sculpt clouds, fly on poems and sketchbooks, and conduct the music of the spheres.

Alma Mater (detail: Touch)

Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, Talladega, AL
bonded bronze, unique cast, 1996
24” x 36” x 3”

From a series of the Five Senses for the pedestal of Alma Mater: designed to be touched and “read” by touch, the sculpted hands are life size and almost full-round, and the background texture is made with thumbprints.

Alma Mater

Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, Talladega, AL
bonded marble, bonded bronze, concrete 1997
90” x 96” x 96”

A commission from AIDB for their Helen Keller School for multi-handicapped children. The figure is signing the word “Sight” and reading in Braille the word “Hearing”. On her pedestal, which has steps in the back, are 5 bas-reliefs depicting the 5 senses. The monument is designed to be touched and climbed on.

Memorial to Countee Cullen

1995
cast polymer cement
72” x 54” x 26

Installed in the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library. Cullen, in middle age, contemplates a marble bust of himself as a young, idealized poet wearing a traditional laurel wreath. Both “marble” and “bronze” are made of cement, evoking the “rare earth” in his poem on the sculpture’s base.

Rosa Parks 3

2009
bronze
22” x 9” x 12”

“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks

2009
bronze
22” x 9” x 12”

Rosa Parks was a professional seamstress, and this is the suit, perhaps one she’d made, that she wears, along with this uncompromising expression, in her mug shot. This bronze is in the collection of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol.

Labor in Massachusetts

2009, bronze
60” x 36” x 2”

Commissioned by the State of Massachusetts for the State House, Boston and sponsored by the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Depicting over 100 figures, the plaque commemorates the life and death of former AFL president Edward Cohen (who was shot to death by a maniac in the governor’s office in 1907) by focusing on the struggles of working families over 175 years. The helix of marching figures depicts every important labor event in MA history.

September 11th: A Memorial for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine 4

2012 bronze, steel, glass, fragments from the rubble of the World Trade Towers
78” x 22” x 24”

This had to be a sculpture of a human being that had absorbed and survived an attack, wounded but alive, unlike the dynamited Bamiyan Buddha statues and so many other universal cultural treasures.

September 11th: A Memorial for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine 3

2012
bronze, steel, glass, fragments from the rubble of the World Trade Towers
78” x 22” x 24”

Inside the reliquary base are pieces of concrete, a tangle of metal reinforcing rods and a shred of Victoria’s Secret lingerie from a store on the concourse. This shred was a terribly poignant reminder that so much that is intimate was exposed, so much that is life-affirming was killed, so much that is instinctive was attacked.

September 11th: A Memorial for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine 2

2012
bronze, steel, glass, fragments from the rubble of the World Trade Towers
78” x 22” x 24”

The reliquary pedestal’s beveled corners and angled top are based on the design of the World Trade Towers.

September 11th: A Memorial for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

2012
bronze, steel, glass, fragments from the rubble of the World Trade Towers,  78” x 22” x 24” (bronze: 39” height)

In 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, my 18″ sculpture of this figure was exhibited at the Cathedral and I was commissioned to create a monumental version that could incorporate fragments from the Towers that had been brought to the Cathedral in 2001.

 

Phillis Wheatley 2

Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
59” x 50” x 32

Here, Wheatley represents youth and Imagination. A stanza from her poem On Imagination is inscribed on her pedestal, ending with visionary imaginative power and freedom:
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul.

Phillis Wheatley 3

Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
59” x 50” x 32

On her pedestal:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery moved
That from a father seized his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Abigail Adams 3

Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
75” x 33” x 21”

“Remember that all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound be any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Letter to John Adams, Mar. 31, 1776