Transcripts For CSPAN3 National World War I Memorial 20240711

Sabin howard present his magnificent classical define for the National World war i memorial. Founded in 2002, the National Civic art society educates and empowers our leaders in the promotion of public art and architecture. Worthy of our great republic. We do so by advocating for the Classical Tradition and civic design. We believe that that tradition is unparalleled in its dignity, beauty and harmony. Not to mention its legibility to the common man. It is no accident that the Founding Fathers chose the classical style when designing the nations capitol and joining its core government. The democratic athens and they knew that classical architecture was time honored and timeless. The National Civil arts Society Works to continue and expand upon the founders vision for the nations capitol and federal design generally. I perhaps dont need to tell you that since the 1950s, washington d. C. Has been marred and disfigured by federal buildings and memorials that do not comport with the citys classical heritage and identity. There is the hersh horn museum, that looks like a bunkerer, and then theres the brutalist fbi building, which i call the ministry of fear. At the same time some of our National Memorials are not only not classical, but they do not reflect the view of the subject commemorated. For example, the Martin Luther king junior is secular, a socialist realist work that fails to include the reverends most famous lines, such as i have a dream. The eisenhower memorial under construction, a traditional and modest president is a big deconstructionist assemblage, of towering pillars and a screen that is bigger than the Hollywood Sign in los angeles. Ever since the construction of the Vietnam Veterans memorial, a memorial to a divisive war, the general trend is that the memorials must not show signs of heroism. The flight 93 memorial in pennsylvania fails to commemorate the heroism of the passengers on that flight. This is the case that despite the fact that those passengers likely saved the plane from crashing into a core building of government. Instead of being commemorated as heroes, the passengers are remembered as nothing but victims. As youll see tonight, the new world war i memorial breaks that trend. While it rightfully acknowledges the magnitude of the suffering and the loss in the war, at the same time it depicts the soldiers bravery in the crucible of battle. It is not another victim memorial. At the same time it tells the story of a country on the rise, confident and powerful. But it is more than that. The memorial is monumental. And beautiful and sends a clear patriotic and compelling message with easily comprehensible symbolism and allegory. We hope it will set a new trend in american commemorative works. You might ask how did such a design come to be selected. The answer lies in great part to the world war i Centennial Commission is holding a commission that unlike other competitions was not biassed against classical design. In favor of modernism and post modernism. The competition jury was also carefully selected and the leadership of the commission played a crucial role. They are to be heartedly commended. Speaking of such leadership, i know turn things over to edwin fountain, vice chairman of the world war i Centennial Commission. Thank you. [ awe applause ] thank you, justin. Thank you for the stimulating conversations we had along the way before and during the competition and the selection process. Youre not here to listen to me. Sabin is more interesting, and what he has to show you is more interesting than what i can. But i want to talk about the selection for the world war one memorial. This, here, this is the rendering of the overall memorial site. If you dont know where it is, this is Pershing Park across the street from the Willard Hotel at the far end of pennsylvania avenue, just one block from the white house. It was an existing memorial to john j. Pershing, and this was the site that congress authorized to redevelop as the National World war i memorial. And in under taking that project we had we began with three constraints. The first was, as you see, this has to be not just a memorial, but a memorial within a well functioning park. So unlike a stand alone memorial in a blank space of grass we had to also serve a civic park function, which helped channel the ultimate selections we made. The site itself is within a very complex urban environment. The neighbors to this site are the Willard Hotel, the washington hotel, the sherman memorial, the department of commerce, the Wilson District building, freedom plaza, and the j. W. Marriott. Very distinct and different urban structures, urban spaces. This site had to harmonize. And be complementary to those sites. And then a third constraint that developed along the way is that we were instructed to preserve the existing park. We resisted, but had ultimately to yield to the inevitable. We had to work in the contours of the existing park. That further drove our channelled our selection. So that meant a memorial based on an architectural form was pretty much a nonstarter, it would never work in a site like this. And it meant that in the end there was a lot of very interesting designs that we looked at that were ultimately discarded. About two of the five finalists, i said i would like to see this built but not here, not within the district of columbia. But within those constraints we had two key and related choices. The first, as justin alluded to, is do we go by open competition or do we have some sort of prescreened competition . Either where we have a request for portfolios and then select designers with a design to come later. Or do we approve a number of established firms and then submit their design and proceed from. We have closely studied that, we largely agreed, and frankly you know, we are, you know, we thought the Vietnam Veterans memorial competition was a success story. So we went on that choice for a variety of reasons. In terms of the form or the style of the memorial. Did we want to prescribe that it would be in one particular motif or another. Did we want to prescribe that . And in the end we opted to leave all of that relatively unstated. We want a variety, a breadth of concepts. So we did not come in prejudging that it would be a classical or a figurative sign. My own personal inclination was in that direction, but we were humble enough to know that we didnt know what we might want and we wanted to throw the field open to see what might come in the door. Ultimately we received 360 submissions from around the world. I learned in this process that chinese architects enter these design competitions in droves. I was very nervous we might have one or two chinese submissions. I suspect they were among the more, whats the word, Creative Solutions that defied certain laws of gravity and physics. And in the end we wound up with five u. S. Based firms, which i was pleased by, but that was not a prerequisite. There was one submission that i remember that had an absolutely beautiful rendering of a sculpture in the round that was just exkwisly done that we paid a lot of attention to but discarded in part because it rested in a form that was not appropriate for the sight. But the sculpture itself it was wrong in theme but the skill and artistry was undoubted. I learned later that was sabin howard but we rejected his submission. Joe is the architect who won the design competition. And what joe did was come up with the park solution. And he contemplated about 300 linear feet of relief sculpture. He photoshopped reference samples to show what it might be, but he didnt attempt to depict a particular narrative or set of images or whatnot. It was just sort of an insert sculpture here to the design. But the jury saw that and it appealed to the commission as well. One of the selling points was that opportunity for a large figure sculpture. Why was that important . To me it was for a number of reasons. The first was commemorating an event that happened 100 years ago. We wanted the memorial to be of the time it commemorated. Although all the veterans had passed by the time we emparked on this memorial, we wanted it to be recognizable to the participants in the conflict that it was commemorating. The second is, more than the other National War Memorials that we have on the mall, a world war i memorial needs a very strong educational element. I happen to like the Vietnam Veterans memorial a great deal, as do many others, but it and the world war ii memorial in a different way, theyre abstract memorials. Viewers dont need to be told what the wars were about or what they mean. But in 50 years from now, what someone will make of this black wall, but world war i, the place it is in the american consciousness, it needed an a narrative element to convey the significance of the war, to convey the magnitude of the american sacrifice in that war, which was the third bloodyiest war in history. The american deaths in that war exceeding those in vietnam and korea combined. There needed to be an educational and narrative component that conveyed that inspired further education at those points. And it needed a visual element. We have seen dozens of movies about the civil war and about pickets charge at gettysburg. Weve seen dozens of movies and tv shows about world war ii. We saw mash the sevietnam war came to us through our tv sets. We dont have that visual representation of world war i. We needed to show that war was every bit as savage and bloody and our soldiers every bit as heroic and courageous as others that we commemorate. So the educational aspects which shows in an impressionistic way what the war looks like and also tells the American Experience of the war. Thats why joes design appealed to us. In the second stage of the competition we said to joe, it might help if you went out and found a sculptor. So he went to the sculptor yellow pages and found sabin howard. And he saw what we saw. And based on his portfolio he is one of the finest sculptors in the world today. I did not come prepared unfortunately to give you his bio. He was raised in italy which gave him an unfair head start. In terms of training as a classic classical sculptor. He studied and taught in philadelphia and elsewhere around the country. He has been a practitioner for 30 years. As you will see in his work it is absolutely exquisite. What we were looking at was these very grecco roman looking nude torsos that he did. And we wanted him to go from single forms to a 38 figure work. Rather than static forms in very classical poses, going to this very violent, turbulent, interlocking groups of figures that were far beyond a what he had done to that point. Had i known what a gamble we were taking at the time, im not sure we would have had the nerve to do it. But he has repaid that gamble in spades. So without further adieu, i will turn it over to sabin howard. [ applause ] all right. Thank you for coming tonight. So, let me give you a taste of where i started. And where my mind was before the project and where it progressed through the project. Because i was unprepared for this project when it began. And as the title is so aptly named, the soldiers journey, it is a heros journey. And i really had to grow with the project to be able to pull off something of such magnitude that would appeal to not only washington, but also the world. Because the world comes to washington to learn about the history of this country. As edwin so aptly stated, i began as a classic ist, and worked out of a studio in the south bronx until joe sent me a very polite email on september 14th, asking me to partner up with him. And i did. So i was doing figures that were very static and esoteric. Im just going to run through these, so you get an idea of what i was doing. But i was casting in bronze and bronze beats mortality. It is a way to create something that outlasts everybody in the room. I learned my craft and my art in italy. Im half italian. My mother is italian, my father is american. My education came from a man who came out of school in germany. And that element about structure of the figure and how the figure is developed as an architectural system, using organic forms, is how i perceived reality. So my education had a large part in how i see reality. So im showing you these, because this is how i think. And the way that i saw a single figure was the way that i eventually was able to compose a composition with 38 figures. I might add that that composition that we finally came up with wasnt the first one. It was around the 18th one. And there were quite a lot of meetings that i drove back to new york to rebuild and start from scratch. These are anatomical drawings that you can see im thinking well below the surface of the human body. And there are a couple of things that really informed my work. First and foremost, like edwin said, what are we depicting . H human beings. Were depicting the human experience. We are showing what it means to be human. Thats a pretty deep statement, because you dont see a lot of that these days. Theres not a lot of figurative art out there, everything is abstract. The other element is that everything is enhanced. And reality is enhanced by digital technology. So this is a journey i want to talk to you about tonight. These are some of the drawings that i was doing before where i used actual people. This is man mark from the from frogs neck in new york. This is the structural element that i applied to my thought process. This is a way of observing reality and transferring it into the art realm. Here is the project that we finally have in front of us. We didnt start here. Its been a long journey, actually. And i realize that today was the first time i drove to washington and i didnt have to go to a bureaucratic meeting. I was really relieved. It was the first time i had a little bit of joy in the car. Im very honest. So i got this project and i thought where do i go . What do i look for . And i used the same way of creating art, my methodology that i had for the previous 30 years. I went to the computer and i looked for pictures of real people and what did they look like . What was the emotion that was there . So i started finding imagery that actually made me realize how human this war was. The girl with the hat reminds me of my daughter. The soldiers above remind me of my friends that i rock climbed with. I began to realize theres a Common Thread here to what ive been doing. So when you get into a project like this, there are a lot of voices. Edwin suggest that i perhaps look for a figure that reminded him of dan daly, the famous marine. I found this picture and sent it to him. So a dialogue begins. Youre not engrossed in the studio by yourself, youre in conversation with thousands of people and it can be rather confusing. Especially when this is a very foreign subject to you. World war i was not taught to me except for european history class. And it didnt have the depths that i might have for American History or other elements of American History. So im looking at these images and im beginning to realize that theres something really painful going on here. So this was my first attempt. This was the architectural element with the sculptures underneath. And that was that began in 2015. Then entering with joe i did these drawings. And there are a couple things that i chose and looked for. Low eye level, giving a monumental feel, a very dynamic quality to the figures. But this was not really the direction we were going to take. This was in 2016 in january. I looked a lot younger back then. You did, too, joe. Its really been quite an epic voyage. Edwin and i talked a bit, and one of the things that really pushed him and inspired him was this piece by schrade, the skull per that created this in front of the capitol building. This took 20 years to create, and then he died two weeks before the unveiling. That is a testament to the amount of energy necessary to create something of such importance and grandeur. But i looked at this, and this is not what i was doing. I was doing something that was static and not really available to the general public. So i needed to change my methodology of creating art so that the person, or the visitor to the memorial seeing my work, would be sucked in and have a visceral reaction. And thats the task that was laid in front of me. Its like, lets make something that will have a direct impact on people and theyll go home and theyll want to learn more and get involved in this in an emotional fashion. So why am i showing the last judgment . I guess through the last three, four months of the project, im hearing you need to put some horses in, you need to put tanks in, you need to put barbed wire in. The list is really long. Its beyond a dozen. You werent hearing it from me. Yeah. But it creates a lot of confusion in an artist, especially something youre thrown into. I went into my studio and im hearing voices in my head i dont always hear voices in my head but this day i did im hearing do what you know. I know the last judgment and i know the figure. So by looking at that i saw this pretzel of humanity. Its all of these figures all intertwined. Theyre not alone, theyre not alienated. Theyre all connected. So it began to dawn on me that if i made a relief that had figures that were moving forward and backwards, advancing and receding in space, you would create something way more dynamic. So i began designing and my first attempts were rather im searching for the word bad. Poor. And i want to show you this was the first attempt. I want to show you the process, its going to take a second to load. I have the versions here. I did 18 versions. I took over 12,000 pictures over, i guess it was, nine months. And what i began to do is i began to work using a cell phone where i would use the burst. You know how you press the button and it will capture movement . I began to do that. So the actors were no longer posing on the stand, they were in movement acting something out and then i would do the burst and i would get 12 frames through that movement and all of a sudden were telling a story. So story has always been a big part of my family. My wife is a novelist. And the influence began to really creep in more and more, and i began to realize, thats the missing element to your work. You need to have a story behind the structural aspect and you need to create a story thats universal and its also my personal story as an artist because i need to be able to get behind it. So here we go. This is the first one that i brought, i think it was april of 2016. And this is so incredibly static and it is a giant mess. Im going to enlarge it and so you can see. And ill scroll across. This is like the line at the supermarket, its never ending and its theres no meaning here. Here is the family, theyre going off to war, and look at the posing. Its not its a little bit stagey, right . So im showing you this to show you my honesty in my process and how much i had to grow to get to the place on the other side. This is the battle scene. Okay. Come on, guys. Thats the battle scene, i know. So one figure in here who has a little bit more action. And then heres the cost of war and heres the return home. And then the final scene is my daughter. The only thing that remained from this initial scene is the image of my daughter at the end. Im going to whiz through as we progressed. So this is ill go slow and then well now, here were starting to get a little bit better on the left with this this idea remained. This idea remained. And then this whole section was cut out. Some of the poses remain. But then look look what happens here. Theres a pose with this model. This is james. I heard a story from james. James was a hes a brit. And his family was personally involved in world war i. His great, great grandfather died, his great uncle served and came back when, with his service revol revolver, shot his wife, shot himself and his daughter. Thats when i started to realize that this is the gravitas that you need to show other people. So without going through too much of this i started posing. You can see how were getting closer, okay. So if i enlarge this and i will wiz through that. Okay, here we go and now were starting to get some place. This was the beginning of where we were going. And you can see the Kinetic Energy. But theres still some confusion with figures facing each other. But then, okay, heres the cost of war and edwin again had an idea, why dont you have a figure coming directly out . There is a lot of suffering here. Again, the end is the same. So i will continue a little bit faster, because the lecture has a lot of elements. Until we arrived, ive reversed the figure in the middle. So he is now leading the charge and you can see how this becomes more cohesive. And the reason that i showed you the anatomical stuff is because you have a hierarchy when you configure many elements. The skeleton is the architecture and the muscles forces them to move. So in some ways im an architect working with organic form. So when you make a single figure it has many units and they have specific importance. And that has to create one unit which is one figure. Here you have to create one composition with many elements. How do you do that . And thats what i learned how to do. Well, at the end of this nine month process with edwin and his commission and no thats not me. We got to a drawing. And i remember sitting with edwin at the barnes and noble on 14th street at union square in new york city, and edwin said, okay, go ahead. Do the drawing. I was so relieved that we had gotten here to this place but i want to say that i think as an artist it is critical to go through this process of commissions because it takes you outside of yourself and forces you to grow in ways that you wouldnt be because theyre so uncomfortable. Theres a lot of looking in the mirror and saying, okay, what do i improve here . And theres a dozen people at that table and you need to hold onto your idea of what the vision is and also at the same time work with them. And thats something that i dont think happens very often because sometimes artists will give in and say, yes, yes, yes, to everybody and then the whole vision falls apart. Im very stubborn and i have a very clear vision sometimes. And so this was something that really was a balance between a democratic concept of a lot of concepts and ideas from a group and then trying to hold onto a vision. Thats a very tricky subject to deal with. So heres our final image. Okay. Lets go now to all right. So im going to run through the next slides to show you what this burst idea with the camera and what it does. Do you see that . Thats what were doing. So were capturing a single image and this is how Technology Comes into play in the image capturing. Its about movement. Nothing is static and what i was doing before, everything is stacked, the rib cage and pelvic block are all vertical. Now theres a diagonal to the figures and the more it increases the more the Kinetic Energy increases and the higher the feel of energy there is. So in our relief we have a plethora of feelings and emotions that describe the war, describe humanity and describe who we are as human beings. So here is the story that my wife informed me one day at the breakfast table called a heros journey and it is a soldiers journey, a call to adventure and then the next section is entering into you cross a threshold and enter into a challenge and temptation here its the war, and then abyss and death is the very center of the competition, followed by transformation, atonement and then return. And then that return comes full circle. So i did not know i was doing this. But i began to realize, after my wife talked to me, she educates me quite a bit, that heros journey is in every single culture of the world and every single time frame of the world. And theres not a single part of society that has not used this template for telling the tale of the hero. This is a diagram of a soldiers journey. And you can see theres a very clear beginning, beginning, a me and an end. If you can look in the middle of that, you can see the x. The x is a symbol for transformation and change. And that was, again, something they had not planned. Obviously, world war i transformed the planet and the world and society on so many levels. For one, it was the end of figurative art and the beginning of modernism and its ironic that this project which follows the war 100 years later is figurative. The figures also took on more morning than just being a soldier and a family going to war. Its an allegory. You have three stories going on. Well, after the drawing was done, we needed to make a sculpture and i traveled 9,000 miles away to make that sculpture over six months. And i had to start again with a different system to create the first. We reshot all the figures in the round. Numbered the figures and began something i had never done before. Its the Digital World of the figure. I had done everything traditionally. I had tools that were used by sculptures 2,000 years ago and clay. I didnt know how to do this programming on a computer. So i end up in digital moviemaking company because they had a full boutique of organization where you could higher sculptures, mold the piece after it was sculpted, cast it and ship it. From that we went through and i had to discuss with them how do you deal with placing figures together on a screen and not losing the proportions of the drawing. The eye level is around the knees. Everything above is reduced spatially from below. The figures look much larger than they actually are. We did milling and tests in the first month to figure out the depth of the relief. These milling tests explain to us very quickly that if we wanted something that was highly emotional, we had to go deeper for greater impact. And that also if this is to be seen from 175 feet away, you need to do something that has really dark darks and light lights. So it pops off the background. Im working in the template of the roman tomb. Thats what i was working with. And from there, this was our final print. From here, we digitalized that and cut the whole all of these figures up into 120 sections. Those 120 sections in plastic were shipped to china, printed in china, and then shipped back to new zealand where they were molded. This is the pink stuff. Its not frosting on a cake. And then transferred to a clay. The clay was then assembled and this is these are digital. So they have a very mannequinlike flavor to them. Im going to go faster through this because i want to show you more of the monument. To give you an idea of how labor intensive it is to create Something Like this. Thats the scale. Those are all the hands and guns. This all has to reoccur at full scale. Do you see how slick this looks . Theres no sense of human fingerprint. Thats the digital fingerprint. Thats what most art is that the figurative today, its done using a mechanical device, the computer, to mill out the figures and something is lost. So i took this and i sculpted for 71 days straight. And transferred it back into a feeling that an artist or a human hand has done it. Thats me after 71 days. [ laughter ] yes, what is that thing you said, 1,000yard stare . In a way, i had ptsd but not to the same level as men on the battlefield. But the intensity of this will play with your head and scramble your brain. These are my final pictures. So now this is cut into sections, deassembled and you go through the same process of molding and you now cast in resin and then you reassemble this. We spray painted that and sent this back to the United States for a meeting. It was in 2018 in february. February. That didnt go so well. Well, we then did a bunch of other meetings with the commission of fine arts that lasted until the following year and then i was asked to reduce the relief and in reducing the relief from 75 feet to our eventual 60 feet, the composition got tighter, more dramatic and more energetic. And, again, i look towards technology. How do we do this quickly . I had four months to redo the whole composition and start the process of thinking ahead to the monument. I went to this place in the uk. They work with damon hurst. And theyre the most cuttingedge foundry in europe. This is a photogametry machine. You put the models on the inside and pose them. And now from here you get a print that its a three dimensional image. This is the same moment historically as we had when photogra photography was invented. A lot of people that are classically trained are saying this is the death of us all. Im going to argue its not. Im going to argue that this enables us to make larger projects but they have to be driven by traditional values and the ability to use your hands and your heart and your brain to create art. The education in a i received is invaluable for using this technology to create things that are really dynamic and human. Thats a print on the screen. Thats the amount of detail that you can get from the machine. Its fabulous but its also a temptress. Its deceptive. As all surface. It doesnt have a lot to do with structure. And structure is what gives feeling and the sense of humanity to sculpture and art. Im going to rush through these. You can see this is how something is done. Its cut in half and reassembled. Thats the top. Thats the bottom. We did a these are oneinch figures. This is a test print. And this was eventually the maquette scale. This is the final assembly of last year in march and then this was cast in resin and quickly patinaed with a base and shipped over to washington from the uk. So from here we eventually passed through the commission of fine arts and im very grateful for that. I wouldnt ever want to go through that again. I learned a lot from it. And i think this is a really interesting project as edwin was talking about. I want to jump into the last segment of this and show you the actual memorial being built. Theres a sense of sacredness to the project where the figures are slightly overscale. Theyre 66. Some of them are slightly larger. Theyre crouching. They would be around 72. But they are bursting at the sal seams of the frame. So theyre larger than life. When you walk along from left to right and you look at these groups and scenes, you realize that theres something very heroic and monumental to this achievement. It speaks well of humanity. It speaks also of heroism that we are able to rise to the occasion faced with great odds. And that fit very, very well with the way i was working before with my creation of figures like apollo or mars or something soft female figures like aphrodite. This is the actual memorial milled out at the foundry. And it looks great in a photo from a distance. But when you see it up close, its still mannequinlike. So this is the first print and this gets shipped and arrives in new jersey at my studio in englewood where it is unloaded and reassembled. The studio also was created to make use of Natural Light so that it wouldnt not be sculpted under incandescent light. It would have the impact outside because it was created in the same sort of environment. This is a studio in progress. And you can see here, our models, were working from models. Most people are working today from photographs and from computer screens. It gets really dangerous when you do that. Those are flat images. Those are references that have no feelings that do not breathe, that do not have any sense of expansion. Okay . When i look at a model, im using my anatomical knowledge to take that, translate that into an art form and one of the big things im looking for is how do i subdivide the figure into surfaces and each one of those sections when you go to the butcher and you see the picture of the cow and its all mapped out, you have your rump steak, all of these sections. Thats called mapping out. And when i do that, each one of the sections is convexity. Its pressing out into space. Thats a symbol of who we are as human beings. Were bursting with light. We have energy pushing out. When we die, the energy or the pressure is gone and on the one hand, im going to make an analogy, a grape turns into a raisin. It shrinks into itself. The sculpture from my concept is about this massive amount of energy pushing out not only at the viewer but progressing towards the future, from left to right. So we sculpt from life 40 hours a week. The other sculptors are learning and were on target in terms of time by next august well be sending the first section to be cast at the foundry. I wanted to show you some of the last its been 12 weeks of sculpting now. For example, in the initial scene where the father is being held back by the mother who is an allegory for the United States or america, here is the father. I put a clamp on his coat and recreated the same sort of tension of his coat being pulled off of his body to joint his comrades in arms. These are the attention to details that will be the narrative for the visitor to understand and tell the story through artistic merit. Not a book, but visual format. Thats rare these days. Is this was the father figure and i worked on that for four weeks. Taking elements such as the coat and pushing the sense of stretch that these men had to go through. Increasing the tension in the jaw and i work with the anatomy to structure things out so i can understand whats going on. This is one of the models, the models are transformed into these characters. This is another model, this is the mother figure in the initial scene. This is the diagramming that i talked to you about, the idea of convexity. There might be con cavities in the body but you dont think that. Because if you do, youre pressing things in. Thats what we get. Thats the digital part. Its a mannequin. It has no energy in it. But its a fantastic armature. We went to a tailor and recreated the same sort of costume that were used in that day and age. And then we applied clay with our hands. And we diagram and we create rhythms and movements that are a translation from reality. And that what youre seeing right there is to tell the story. Its done not for a chanel commercial, beautys sake, but its done to tell a story that will impact that eighth grader when we walks by, so that he will get very interested in something that happened 100 years ago. This is the foam and clay from an afternoon of chopping where its cut off and reformed. And this is a to show you a little bit about the rhythms and the diagrams, you can see deltoid, triceps, extensors, these curves are very much the way art was once taught and now has been eliminated in art schools. For the most part, figurative art is relegated to a threehour block in an art students career. See the dynamic action. Nothing is still. So our models are suffering right now. Theyre not just standing around. Theyre actually in motion. And theres a lot of grumbling going on. But its working. It gives you an idea of the alteration. The way that the calf bulges, the way that the achilles heel is tense, the glutes and the tightness, the sense of the rib cage and how the arm flows out from the back. Thats what were looking at. This is me teaching one of my assistance. So this is what we started from and this is what the template is to play forward. This is a native American Indian from the cherokee tribe who we went out my wife and i went out to find a native american who would come model for us. And then one of the people that i really admire and respect and hope to play forward the message that he left to us, michelangelo, but theres great dignity even to this foot and this back. And you can see the fullness and the energy thats there. And thats what washington needs, from my viewpoint, a sense of dignity. Because art is a representation of your culture and i dont want to be represented by cinder blocks. I wanted to show you something that happened in the final stage last week. Let me engage you in the three figures that are standing. As we move into the fuller scales, we have much more to work with and the story gets a lot deeper. Here is the wife who is also an allegory for america. We were reluctant to enter into this war. And heres the husband who represents america and the hero. So he pulls away from her and he is caught in the middle between the brotherhood of arms and his family. And i want you to look at this is just started. But if i show you the faces, they begin to tell a story. The wife is the beginning of beauty, were not there yet. Theres a fierce charge in this soldier and this brotherhood of arms figure carries the anger and hatred of war. And the aggression that is necessary to survive and win. These soldiers here are different types. Theyre not all generic. This man was selected specifically for his ethnic background. Africanamerican here as well, wearing a french helmet. And then the we did not wear putties when we went into wore, we wore gators. And so the attention to detail is beginning to come out at this scale. The cartridge belts have to be developed. Theyre full. Theyre not empty. And heres the dress that was designed for the project. And the shirt as well. This is last week, we got our next shipment. This is at the foundry and the battle scene was the next shipment. This is the maquette. All of the logistics in this project, its huge. Both my wife and i work nonstop during the week. Im doing the artistic element, shes doing the business part. The amount of detail to get this done is incredible. The figure in the middle is full photogrametry. Thats a photograph and we use the same model that we had used in the initial drawings. Now its three dimensional. That will get chopped when i work from the life model next year. This gives you a sense of scale. It will be slightly higher when its cast and shown. So thats the battle scene that arrived with the green as the clay on top. You have 2 to 4 millimeters of clay and this is pure milling with no clay. This is the studio with the battle scene. And thats that central figure representing dan daily. This is a native american that i showed you photographs before from the cherokee nation. And this is my special tool, 1. 25 kmart brush. It does the work. Its not your tools. Its whats in your head, heart and education. What you know, your education, creates your reality through your perception. So we put the composition together and this is the how many first 18 figures and its really interesting because i havent seen anything like this lately. And im really excited to share this with you tonight because im hoping this is the beginning of something new in the art world. Justin, thank you for having me. And edwin, thank you for picking me, sort of. Im still working that out. Thank you, joe, for asking me to be your partner. Also my wife as well for standing by me. [ applause ]. How did you reach the scene in the end of your concept. If you have too many things going on, it gets confusing for the viewer. I needed to come up with something that really you cant handle everything. Theres so many different elements. Yes, you could have put the enemy in. But all of a sudden the story becomes more complicated. Is that something you made up your mind about quickly . It was quick in the beginning. Its a question. Yeah. I wanted to make something that was easily understood by all. And then you have many layers too. I felt if i put the enemy in, you get confusion. Any other questions . Thank you very much. Maybe a silly question, where does all the money come from . The way things tend to work with memorials in washington, Congress Passes the legislation and says no federal funds shall be spent on this memorial, by the end of the project, federal funds have found their way into the memorial. Roughly speaking, its twothirds private, onethird public at this point. Private funds have been raised from High Net Worth individuals and foundations that have a particular interest in the messaging and history being commemorated here. Yes, right here. Thank you. This may be also a question for edwin. I apologize. I absolutely the location is perfect right by the white house, right by the treasury, commerce department. Can you talk about maybe any restoration of the park . Because right now i wouldnt want this magnificent sculpture to be somewhere that may not smell the best or have or have, you know, something this grand be diminished by not a good park. Thats how federal money is finding its way in. As i say, we were required ultimately under the National Historic preservation act to preserve the existing park which was deemed historic work of american landscape architecture. Much of the design work, much of the in the process, were going to have to tear up the park and put it back the way it was. And so we persuaded the park service that a lot of the project is rehabilitating what had gone to had become dilapidated over the last 35, 40 years and we really shouldnt have to pay for that. And the park service with help from people on capitol hill who we know agreed. Theyre kicking in money under the heading of deferred maintenance. When we are redoing the plantings because trees were planted and with inadequate soil volumes and whatnot, thats going to be paid for by the park service. When were replacing plumbing systems, thats being paid for by the park service. The second half of it is the maintenance. And so under the commemorative works act, the memorial sponsor has to provide a 10 endowment, 10 of the Construction Cost on top has to be paid over to the park service and that goes to pay for big picture maintenance. Someone breaks off a piece of a rifle or Something Like that, theres a Lightning Strike that does something. As to the daily maintenance, i work with the Monuments Commission which built the park in the first play, we built the war memorial and we maintain all the military cemeteries. Were the Gold Standard when it comes to maintenance of the sites if youve been to one of those sites. Normandy being our best one. Congress likes us a lot more than they like the park service and its easy for us to get funds for a war memorial than it is for the park service to get funds for an urban park in washington, d. C. Thats where federal money is coming into the project and thats how it will be used to make sure that the site lives up to the sculpture. That the site honors the memorial that were putting into it. There are a handful of very competent scul competent sculptors, a canadian who worked in britain, actually Robert Ingersoll who did the world war i memorial sculpture in kansas city but also did interior sculpture. Your work, frankly, is so much more ambitious than any of those projects. But did you did you do you use those in your memory bank as inspiration, as touchstones for your work . Thank you for that question. Its a really important element to my work that i play that i follow in the footsteps. I did make a trip specifically to london from the foundry to look at the jagger sculpture at paddi paddington station. I was impressed by the proportions of the figure. They were reminiscent of the cube system that michelangelo used for a rib cage to give it a structural vitality that would last through many, many ages. Its also a sense of static energy that is breathing and living. Another element that was important from that piece, i was very intrigued by the texture and how the texture was not smoothed over like a lot of what were seeing today in modern times, but it was applied and had a lot more emotion and drama to it. And i felt that was very fitting to a memorial and thats one of the things that im playing forward where the actual application of the clay enhances the story so it has more movement and vitality that gives it a quality. Jagger is the one artist that i really looked at carefully. And just a caveat for edwin. Ive just restored the very first figurative fountain in america, the schyulkill river in philadelphia which has been in storage for 70 years. Admittedly on view in the philadelphia museum, but effectively in storage. But to my mind, the most vulnerable part of monuments are the water features because unlike roman fountains which are gravity fed, the mechanisms and in this country, we have a great deal of problem with the water features. This is a simplified water feature which should have a better future, on the other hand, the water feature inside the Smithsonian Art Museum has been decommissioned. Theyve given up trying to get that to work satisfactorily. Having seen the construction drawings, the water system is n not as simple as we would like. We knew that the park service hates taking care of water. By the time we got through the commission of fine arts, we have the original footprint of the pool at that site and on the back of the sculpture sits on a freestanding wall within the pool and theres water cascading over the back as well as in front. And so its complicated. Well aware of that. And, hence, the commitment to maintenance. I would be remiss if i didnt give one update on the status of the project particularly because my fund raiser is sitting in the back there. Its about a 45 million project. We raised about 35. We got 10 to go. We will get there. Its a question of when. Were anxious to break ground on the park itself. Once we do that, the park will be brought back up to speed. There will be the platform for the sculpt will be there and well put up temporary imaging like the scaffolding you see around europe. Its going to take five years to finish this. His wife tracy tells me hes going to take 3 1 2. Shes the boss. Bobby . Will this be lighted during the evenings . Yes, we have spent a lot of time on lighting design. Thats one of the areas they drilled into. The lighting is going to be spectacular. Solar or electric . Electric. We did a lighting test. This was fantastic. Sculpture lives or dies by light. And we got somebody who did the lighting for the sculptures in the met in new york. We were on the same page, i wanted lighting that was above and threequarters so that all of the figures pop out from the background and the story becomes even more impactful at night, from my perspective, it will be more dramatic and thats the money shot that will be shown when the memorial is done. Its really strong. One final question. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of getting all of the historical details right . I know you had a lot of help from military historians. So as you know, commissioner, saban has worked with the battle Monuments Commission throughout the process. Our deputy secretary, chief historian, as well as our commissioner who is on the world war i commission, all bring expertise of that age and so some several months ago, saban came into our office, we went through the entire story board of the piece, picked out every area where he needed to be attentive to, to historical accuracy. Rob and mike will be coming up to his studio periodically. If hes going to be sending off the first section to the foundry in august, then probably may, june, well go up there and walk the length of it and say, those buttons have to be changed. One thing that we never noticed when the maquette was a foot high, but did notice when it was 6 1 2 feet high was the cartridge belts. They dont go around these days with a full rack of bullets in them. It became obvious, those are deflated. Theyre going to have to be filled out. We pointed that out to saban and hes already started working on that. There are legions of nitpickers out there. We want to silence them. We want to be faithful to the troops as they were. So were putting a lot of attention into that. And we used also original uniforms that saw combat. In fact, i found pictures in a Salvation Army uniform that i got that had pictures from home in it, still. And that adds a lot of the vtruh to the project. Please join me in thanking saban for a wonderful presentation. And its a strong term, but i think we might see a masterpiece in the making. Thank you. [ applause ] weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Public historians talk about the history of africanamerican voting rights. Explaining the various ways the sites and organizations present and share this history. This discussion was part of the association of the study of africanamerican life and historys annual conference earlier this fall. It starts at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Join American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, bestselling authors and professors Kathleen Rooney and miles harvey talk about how they approach Historical Research for their fiction and nonfiction work. At 6 00 p. M. Eastern, Scott Hartwig discusses his research on the battle of antetum. On sunday at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, former u. S. Senator sam noun reflects on the cold war. Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan3. Summer 1945. And the war was 1 million men old