Transcripts For CSPAN3 National World War I Memorial 20240711

Classical tradition and civic design. We believe that tradition is unparalleled in its dignity, beauty, and harmony. It is no accident that the Founding Fathers chose the classical style when joining its core government. The democratic athens and they knew that classical architecture was time honored and timeless. The National Civil arts society continues for the Nations Capital and federal design generally. I perhaps dont need to tell you that since the 1950s, washington dc has been marred and disfigured by central buifedera and memorials that do not comport with the classical heritage and identity. There is the hersh horn society, and there is the fbi building that 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 failed to include his most famous lines such as i have a dream. The memorial under construction, a traditional and modest president is a big deconstructionist assemblage, and a woving steel screen bigger than the hollywood seen in los angeles. Since the construct of the Vietnam Veterans memorial, a memorial to a divisive war, the general trend is that 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 sdidespit the fact they 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 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 aligory. You might ask how did such a design come to be selected. It lies in great part to the world war i scentennial commission is holding a commission that unlike other competitions was not biassed against classical design. The competition jury was selected and the lip of the commission played a crucial role. They are to be commended. Speaking of such leadership, i know turn things over to edwin fountain, vice chairman of the world war i scentennial commission. Thank you. Thank you, justin. Thank you for the stimulating conversations we had along the way before and during the competition and the selection process. So 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 the mark and across the street from the hotel at the far end of pennsylvania avenue, just one block from the white house. It was an existing memorial, the commander of the american expediti expeditionary forces. And in under taking that project we had to begin 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 serve a civic park function. The site is within a very complex urban environment. The neighbors to this site are the urban hotel, the washington motel, the department of commerce, the Wilson District building, freedom plaza, and the j. W. Marriott. This site had to harmonize. And then a third constraint that developed along the way is that we were instructed to preserve the existing park. That initse itself had to go to inevitab inevitable. We had to work in the contours of the existing park. That also channelled our selection. So that memorial based on architectural form was a nonstarter that 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 left were in this part of philadelphia. But within those constraints we had two key and related choices. The first is do we go to open competition or do we have a prescreened competition. We have select designers that will come platter, or do we choose the firm and invite them to have their dine concepts and proceed from there. 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 describe that it would be in one motif or another. And in the end we opted to leave all of that relatively unstated. We want a variety, a breadth of concep concepts. So we did not come in prejudging that it would be a classical or a figuratiative sign. Ultimately we received 360 submissions from around the world. Chinese architects enter these in droves. I was very nervous we might have one or two. I expect they were among the more Creative Solutions that defied certain laws of gravity and physics. But it was not a prerequisite. There was one submission that had a beautiful rendering of a sculpture that was just exquisitely 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 skill and ar tis ri joe is the one that won the competition. And he came up with the park solution, and he photo shopped reference amples asamples. And it was just sort of an insert sculpture here. But they saw the merit to that and it appealed to the commission as well. One of the selling points was that opportunity for a large figure sculpture. To me it was for a number of reasons. We wanted the memorial to be of the time that it was commemorated. But all of the veterans of the war had passed by the time we had this memorial and we want it had to be recognizable to the participants part of it. It is a very strong educational development. I happy to like the Vietnam Veterans memorial but it and the World War Two memorial in a different way theyre both about instruct memorials. They 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 element to convey the magnitude of the American Service and sacrifice in that war. The third bloodiest in history. The american deaths exspeeding 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 civilget gettysburg. We saw mash, the vietnam war came to us through our tv sets. E we dont have that visual representation of world war i. We needed to show that war was every bit as savage and bloody as orethers. So the narrative that we will show you shows what the war looked like in an impressionistic way and shows the American Experience of the war. That is why joes design appealed to us. In the second stage we said 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. 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 is very grecco roman looking news torso. And we wanted him to go from single forms to a 38 figure work. Rather than stathic foric forms classical poses to violent turbulent interlocking groups of figures. Had i know what a gamble we were taking at the time, im not sure we would have had the nerve to do it, but he 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. 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. The world comes to washington to learn about the history of this country. As edwin so aptly stated, i started as a classicist working in the south bronx until joe sent public highway very polite email on september 14th asking me to partner up with him, and i did. So i was doing figures that were static and esoteric and im going to just run through these, 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 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 into my education had a large part. So this is how i think. The way that i saw a single figure is the way they was eventually able to compose a come suggestion with 38 figures. The composition that we finally came up with was not the first one, it was around the 18th one and there was quite a lot of meetings that i drove back to new york and started from scratch. These are drawings that you can see that im thinking well below the surface of the human body. There are a couple things that really informed my work. First and fore most, what are we depict depicted . Were depicting the Human Experience experience. It is a pretty deep statement. The other element is that everything is enhanced. And reality is enhanced by digital technology. So this is a journey i want to talk about tonight. I used actual people, from frogs neck in new york, this is the structural element that i applied by 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. It has been a long journey. And i realize that today was the first day that i drove to washington and i didnt have to go to a bureaucratic meeting. I was really relieved. Im very honest. So i got this project and i thought where do i go . What do i look for. And i use the same of creating art and methodology that i had for the previous 30 years. Real people, what did they look like what was the emotion that was there. So i was finding imagery, the girl with the hat that reminds me of my daughter. I started to realize there there is a Common Thread here to what i have been doing. It is suggesting that perhaps that i look for a figure that reminded him of dan daily. I sent him the picture, so a doog log begins. Youre engrossed in this conversation with thousands of people and it can all be rather confusing. Especially when this is a very foreign subject to you. World war one was ni was not tae except for european history class. Im looking at these images and im understanding that there is something very painful in here. This is my first attempt. This is the architectural element and that began in 2015. So there are a couple things they looked for, a low eye level, giving a very dynamic quality to the figures. This is not really the direction that were going to take. This was in 2016 in jan, it looked a lot younger pan then. Edward and i talked a little bit and one of the things that pushed him and inspired him was this piece by the sculptor that created this in front of the capital building. 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. This is not what i was doing. I was static and not really available to the general public. I needed to change my methodology of creating art so the person who was a visitor to the memorial was sucked in and have a visceral reaction. This is the task laid before you. They have l go home and they want to learn more and they will want to get involved in this. Why am i showing this judgement you need to put tanks in, you need to put barbed wire in, it creates a lot of confusion. I dont always hear voices in my head, but this day i did and thats what i know. I know the last judgment and i know the figure. So by looking at that i saw this pretzel of humanity. All of these figures. They are not alienated. So it dawned on me that if i had relief of figures that were moving forward and backwards, advancing and reseeding spacedi it could be more dynamic. 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, it will take a second to load. I have the other versions here. I did 18 versions. I took 12,000 pictures over, i guess it was nine months. And i started to work using a cell phone where i would use the burst. You know how you press the button and it will capture movement. 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 the sudden were telling the story. Story has always been a big part of my family. He is a novelist. And the influence started to creep in more and more and i realized that was the missing element. And you need to create a story that is universal. We 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 scroll across, its like the line at the super market, its just never ending and it is, there is no meaning here. Here is the family, theyre going off to war, and its opposing, its stagey, right . So im showing you this to show you my honesty and get to the place on the other side. So this is the battle scene. I know, battle scene. So one figure in here, he has a little more action and here is the cost of war. And here is the returns. So the only thing that reminds me is the image of my daughter at the end. Im going to wiz through as we progress. So ill go slow and then you know, here were starting to get better on the left. This idea remained, this idea remained. And then this whole section was cut out. Some of them remain, and look at what happens here. There is a pose with this bottle. This is james. I heard a story from james. He was he is a brit. His family was personally involved in world war i. His great, great grandfather died, his great uncle served and with his Service Revolver shot his wife, himself, and his daughter. Thats when i started to realize that this is the graf as it 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 kenetic energy. But here is the cost of war and again, why dont you have a figure coming corredirectly out. There is a lot of suffering here. And the end is the same. So i will continue a little faster because this lecture has a lot of elements. Unless we arrived i 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. The skel ton is teton is the are and the muscles forces them to move. So 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 competition with many elements, how do you do that . That is 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 he said 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 balk it takes you outside of yourself and forces you to grow in ways that you would not because theyre so uncomfortable. There is a lot of looking in the mirror saying okay, what do i improve here and there is a dozen people at that table, and you need to hold on to your idea of what the division is and also at the same time work with them and that is something that i dont think happens very often. Sometimes they will give in and say yes, yes, yes to everybody and then it all falls apart. Im very stubborn, and i have a very clear vision sometimes. So this was something that really was a a democratic concept, a lot of concepts and ideas from a group and trying to hold on, that is a very tricky subject to go on. Here is my final image. Okay, so, im going to run through the next slides to show you what this burst idea, with a camera, and what it does. Do you see that . That is what were doing. So were capturing and this is how it plays in the image capturing. He is static. And what i was doing was going dye diagnol. So we have a plethora of feelings and emotions. They describe war, humanity, and who we are. So we have a heros journey and it is a soldiers journey if is a call to adventure. And then, the next section is entering a challenge and temptation here. Its the war. This is the very center of the competition followed by transformation, atonement, and return. And then the return comes full circle. Sdoi not know i was beginning to do this after my wife talked to me. She educates me, and that it is every culture of the world and every time frame of the world and and there is no part of society that has not used this template for telling the tale of hero. This is a diagram of a soldiers journey. And you can see there is a very clear beginning, midding, and 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 not something that i planned. Obviously world war i transformed the planet and the society on so many levels. For one it was the end of figtive art. Modernism, and this was ironic that this project is figtive. The figures also took on more meaning. So you have three different stories. You have the United States, and you have a myth lott kag story as well. We needed to make a sculpture and i travelled 9,000 miles away to make that sculpture over six months. And in so doing i had to start again with a different system to create the first that was a 12 inch high figures. We reshot all of the high figures in the round. Number the figures, and then began something which i never dwelled in before. It is the Digital World of the figure. I had done everything traditionally. I had a model, lighting, and tools that were used by sculptors 2,000 years ago, and clay. I didnt know thousand do this programming on a europe so they had a full boutique of organization where you could hire sculptors, mold the piece after it was sculpted, cast it, andship it, and we went through and we had to discuss with them how do you deal with placing figures together on a screen and not losing property prorgss of the drawing president the eye level is around the knee, so everything is reduced spatially from below. So the figures look 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 down deeper for greater impact. If this is to be seen from 175 feet away it has to have dark darks and light lights so it really pops off of the background. So im working in the template of the roman sarcophagus. Some of those are eight or nine feet long and they might have 25 figures. 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. The 120 sections were shifted to china, printed to china, sent back to new zealand. Then they were molded. This is the pink stuff. Not frosting on a cake, and transferred to a clay. The clay was then assembled and this is, these are digital. So they have a very mannequin like flavor to them. Im going to go faster because i want to show you more of the movement, but to show you how labor intensive it is, that is the scale. Those are all of the hands and guns. Do you see how slick this looks . There is no sense of human fingerprints nap is what most art is, its figtive tod tfigurs done today. It is used 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 had done. That is me after 71 days. Yes, what is that thing that you said . 1,000 yard stare . In a way i had ptsd. I experienced ptsd but not to the same way of the men on the battlefield, but the intensity of this will play with your head and scramble your brain. These are my final pictures. So then now this is cut into sections, deassembled. And you go through the process of molding. You cast in resin and you reassemble this. We spray painted that and sent it back to the United States for a meeting. That didnt go so well. Well we then did a bunch of other meetings with the kmegs of fine arts that lasted until the following year and then i was asked to reduce the relief and in reducing the relief the cop suggestion got tighter, and again i look towards technology. How do duo this quickly . I had now four months to redo the whole competition and start the process of thinking habit to the monument. I went to a place in the uk that works with hurst. And they are basically the most cutting edge foundry in europe. This is a photo machine that sets up 160 cameras around the model. You put them on the inside and you pose them, and now from here you get a print that is a three dimensional image. So this is the same moment historically as we had when photography was invented but now it is three dimensional. So now people are saying this is the death of us all. Im going to argue its not. Im going to say 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. So my education is invaluable for using this technology to create thing thats are really dynamic and human. That is a print on the screen. That is the amount of detail that you can get from the machine. It is fabulous, but it is also a temptress. It is deceptive because it is all surface. It doesnt have a lot to do with structure. And structure gives feeling and the tense of humanity to sculpture and art. So im going to rush through these, this is how something is done, its cut in half, and reassembled. That is the top, that is the bottom. We did a one inch figure, this was a test print. This was the scale that we showed to the fine arts committee. Commission. So this is the final assembly of march and then this was cast in resin. And quickly petinaed with a base. So from here we eventually passed through the commission of fine arts. Im very grateful for that. I would not want to go tlau again, but i learned a lot from it. And i think that this is a really interesting project. And im going to jump into the last segment of this and show you then the memorial being biltt. There is a sense of siacredness. Some of them are slightly larger because theyre not standing upright. Theyre crouching so they would be around 72. But they are bursting at the se seams of the frame. So they are larger than life. So when you walk around from left to right and you look at these groups and scenes you realize that there is something very heroic and monumental to this achievement of these men going into battle and then returning. It speaks well of humanity. It speaks also of heroism that we are able to rise to the occasion faced with great odds. That fit very well with my creation of figures like apollo or mars or some of the female figures. It is shipped to my studio where it is unloaded. And the studio was created to make use of natural light. So that it would not be sculpted under incandescent light. So it would have the impact outside because it was created in the same sort of environment. This is the studio in progress. You can see our models, were working from models. Most people are working from photographs and computer screens. That is dangerous because those are flat imageimages. They are references that do not breathe or have any sense of expansion. So 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. Each section, you go to the butcher and you see the section of the cow mapped out. You have a rump steak, all of these sections, i map out the figure using my anatomical knowledge for what im seeing. When i do that each section is pressing out into space. That is a symbol for who we are as human beings. Were bursing with life and energy that were pushing out. When we die, the energy and the pressure a grape turns into a raisin. My concept is about this massive amount of energy pushing out, but progressing towards the future from left to right. So e we sculpt from life 40 hou a week. Were 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 it has been 12 weeks of sculpting now. In the initial scene when the father is being held back by the mother, which is an a golalagor the United States, i put a c clamp on his coat to create the same kind of image going forward. These are important for the visitor to know the story through artistic merit. Not a book buzz visual format. That is rare these days. The book has become more important than the visual format. I worked on the father figure for four weeks taking elements like the coat and pushing a sense of stretch that these men haez to go through. Increasing the tension in the jaw. I worked with the agnat my to structure things out in is a model, the models are transformed into these characters. This is the mother figure and the initial scene. This is the diagramming that i talked to you about. There might be complexitiecomplt if you do youre pressing things in. In a is what we get. That is the digital part. It fantastic to put the play on. We went to a tailor and recreated the same sort of costumes used in that day and age. And then we apply clay with our hands, and we diagram and we create rhythms and a translation from reality. That what youre seeing right there is to tell the story. Its done not for appear chanel commercial beauty sake but done to tell a story that will impact that eighthgrader when he walks by so he will get very interested in something that happened 100 years ago. This is the clay from an afternoon of chopping where its cut off and reformed. To show you a little about the rhythms and diagrams, you can see how, for example, deltoid, triceps, ex ten sors. This is the way it was taught in art school. Now its relegated to a threehour block in an art students career. See the dynamic action . Nothing is still. So our models are suffering right now. Our models arent sitting steel, they are working. Gives an idea of working, how the calf bulges, achilles heel tenses, glutes and their tightness and then the quads and the sense of a rib cage and major coming to the deltoid and how the arm flows out from the back, thats what were looking at. This is me teaching one of my assistants. This is what we started from, and this is what the template is to play forward. This is native American Indian from the cherokee tribe, who my wife and i went out to find a native american who would come model for us. And then one of the people i really admire and respect and hope to play forward the message he left us with michelangelo. Theres a sense of great dignity even to this foot and this back. You can see the fullness and energy thats there. Thats what washington needs, from my viewpoint, a sense of dignity because art is a representation of your culture. I dont want to be represented by cinder blocks. So i wanted to show you something that happened in the final stage last week. Did you see let me engage you in the three figures that are standing. So as we move into the fuller scales, we have much more to work with. The story gets a lot deeper. So here is the wife, who is also an allegory for america. We were reluctant to enter into this war. Here is the husband, who also 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. I want you to look at this has just started. But if i show you the faces 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. Thels soldiers here are different types. They are not all generic. This man was selected specifically for his ethnic background. Africanamerican here as well wearing a french helmet. We did not wear putties when we went into war, we wore gaiters. These are full details. The cartridge belts are full, not empty. Here is 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 moquett we used to put this together. Do you understand how deep this is on many levels. My wife acts as my project manager for all the logistics in this project. Its huge. Both of us work during the week. Im doing the artistic work and shes doing the detail. The amount of detail is incredible. The figure in the middle is full photogrammetry. Thats a photograph and we use the same model we had used in the initial drawings, except now three dimensional. That will get chopped when i work from the live model next year. This gives you a sense of scale. Its underground here but now cast and shown. Thats the battle scene. Green on top. You have to 2 to 4 millimeters of clay, then this is pure milling with no clay. This is the studio with the battle scene. Thats that central figure representing dan daly. This is a native american that i showed you photographs of before from the cherokee nation. This is my special tool, 1. 25 kmart brush that i brought does the trick. Its not the tools. Its whats in your head and heart and education. How what you know, your education, creates your reality through your perception. So we put the composition together, and this how many first 18 figures. Its really interesting because i havent seen anything like this lately. Im really excited to share this with you tonight, because im hoping this is the beginning of something new in the art world. So justin, i want to thank you for having me. Edwin, thank you for picking me, sort of. Im still working that out. Thank you, joe, for asking me to be your partner, and also my wife as well for standing by me. [ applause ] [ inaudible ] i think you have too many things going on, it gets confusing for the viewer, so i needed to come up with something. You cant handle everything. Theres so many different elements. Yes, you can put the enemy in but the story becomes more complicated. Did you have to sort that out [ inaudible ] it was pretty quick in the beginning. Because its a question. Yeah. I wanted to make something easily understood by all. Then you have many layers, too. I felt if i put the enemy in, you get confusion, yeah. Any other questions . Thank you very much. May be a silly question but where does all the money come from . The way things tend to work with memorials in washington, when Congress Passes legislation and says no federal funds shall be used on the memorial, by the end of the project federal funds have found their way into the memorial. So its roughly speaking id say twothirds private, onethird public at this point. Private funds have been raised principally from High Net Worth individuals and organizations 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, so i apologize. Might want to i absolutely the location is perfect right by the white house, the treasury, right by the commerce department. Can you talk about maybe any restoration of the park, Pershing Park . Right now i wouldnt want this magnificent sculpture to be somewhere that may not smell the best or have, you know, something this grand be diminished by not a good park. So thats how federal money is finding its way in. So as i say were required under National Historic restoration act to restore the park, which was deemed significantly a work of american landscape architecture. So much of the design work in the process were going to have to tear up the park and put it back the way it was. 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. The park service with some help with some people on capitol hill we know agreed. They are kicking in money under the heading of deferred maintenance. So when we are redoing the plantings, because trees were planted with inadequate soil volumes and what not, thats going to be paid for by the park service. When were replacing broken stone work, mechanical, electrical, plumbing systems, thats being paid for by the park service. The second half is the mapt anyones. Under commemorative works act which covers memorials in washington, d. C. , the memorial sponsor has to provide a 10 endowme endowment, 10 of the Construction Cost on top has to be paid to the park service, and that goes to pay for big picture maintenance. A pump break. Theres a lightning strike, who knows what. As to the daily maintenance over the last 30 years, my day job is with American Battle Monuments Commission, which built Pershing Park in the first place, built the world war ii memorial, korean memorial. To be frank we are the Gold Standard when it comes to maintenance of the site when it comes to cemeteries, normandy. Undertaken to provide for the maintenance of the site once its built, because congress likes us a whole lot more than you like the park service. Easier for us to get funds for maintenance of war memorial than park service to get maintenance of 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 the site lives up to the sculpture, the site honors the memorial were putting into it. As you well know, sabin, there are a handful of very competent world war i sculptures, makenzie, a canadian who worked in briton, hazel tine, another who did the world war i sculpture in kansas city but also did interior sculpture. Your work, frankly, is so much more ambitious of any of those projec projects. But did you do you use those in your memory bank as inspiration, as touch stones for your work . Thank you for that question. Its a really important element to my work that i play forward the tradition, that i follow in the footsteps. I did make a trip specifically to london from the foundry in stroud to look at the jagger sculpture at paddington station one of the things that impressed me how blocklike, reminiscent of cube system michelangelo used for a rib cage to give it heavy set structural vitality that will last through many, many ages. Its power. Its also a sense of aesthetic energy that is breathing and living. The other element very important from that piece that was really i was very intrigued by the texture and how the texture was not smooth 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. I felt that was very fitting to a memorial. Thats one of the things im playing forward where the actual application of the clay enhances the story so it has more movement and vitality that gives it an ethereal quality. Jagger is the one artist that ive really looked at carefully. And just a caveat for edwin, ive just restored the very first figurative fountain in america, the allegory of the Schuylkill River in philadelphia, which has been in storage for 70 years. Admittedly on view in the Philadelphia Museum but effectively in storage. To my mind the most vulnerable part of monuments like this are inevitably the water features. Unlike roman fountains, which are gravity fed, the mechanis mechanisms in this country we have a great deal of problems with the water features. This is a very simplified water feature, which should have a better future. On the other hand the water feature inside the National Portrait gallery has been decommissioned. They have given up trying to get that to work satisfactorily. Having seen the construction drawings, the water system isnt quite as simple as wed like. One parameter we did original put in the compositietition bris no water, because we knew there was problems and we knew the park has trouble taking care of water. By the time we got to the museum of arts, we had the pool at that site. On the back of the sculpture sits on a freestanding wall thats inside, within the pool, and theres water cascading over the back as well as the front. So its complicated. Well aware of that. Hence, the commitment to maintenance. Id be remiss if i didnt give one update on the status of the project, particularly because my fundraiser is sitting in the back there. Its about a 45 million project, we raised about 35, weve got about 10 to go. We will get there. Its a question of when. Were very anxious to break ground on the park itself. Once we do that in about 12 months, the park will be brought back up to speed. There will be the platform for the sculpture will be there and well put up temporary imagery like the scaffolding youll see around buildings in europe when they are redoing them and they show you what the building looks like. Sabin is going to take sabin says hes going to take five years to finish this. His wife tracy tells me hes going to take three and a half. Shes the boss. Bobby. [ inaudible ] yes. We have spent a lot of time on lighting design. That is one of the areas the commission of fine arts really drilled into as jessica can tell you. The lighting is going to be spectacular. Solar or electric. Electric. We did a lighting test. This was like fantastic, because usually sculpture lives or dies by light. We got somebody who did the lighting for the sculptures at the met in new york. We were on the same page. I wanted lighting that was from above and threequarters, so that all the figures pop out from the background and the story becomes even more impactful at night. From my perspective, it will become more dramatic and thats the money shot that will be shown when the memorial is done. Its really strong. One final question. Tell us a little about the process, the process of getting all the historical details right. I know you had a lot of help from military historians. So as you know, commissioner, sabin has worked closely with the American Battle Monuments Commission throughout the process. Our deputy secretary rob dalessandro, chief historian nabz, commissioner, american material culture of that age. So several months ago sabin came into our office. We went through the entire storyboard of the piece, picked out every area where he needed to be attentive to historical accuracy. Rob and mike will be coming up to his studio periodically. If hes going to be sending off to the first section to the foundry in august, probably may, june well go there and walk the length of it and say those buttons need to be changed. One thing we didnt notice when the maquette. Those cartridge belts, they dont go around with full bullets in them. At some point we realized they were deflated and we have to fill them out. Sabin is on that. Theres a legion of nitpickers and we want to be faithful to the them. Combat, i found pictures in a Salvation Army uniform i got from mike that had pictures from home in it still. Thats a lot of veritas and truth to the project because the cloth actually folds the same way it did originally rather than a fabric thats different. Same tooth. Please join me in thanking sabin for a wonderful presentation. [ applause ] 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. Tonight public historians talk about the history of africanamerican Voting Rights explaining the various ways their sites and organizations share this history. The discussion was part of the study of africanamerican life and historys annual conference earlier this fall. It starts at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspa 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, best selling authors and Depaul University professors Kathleen Rooney and miles harvey talk about how they approach Historical Research for their fiction and nonfiction work. 6 00 p. M. On the civil war Scott Hartwig and Military Park historian discusseses the ballots of antietam. Lectures in history, professor discusses richard nixon, his National Security adviser, Henry Kissinger and their key Foreign Policy initiatives. On sunday at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, former u. S. Senator sam nunn reflects on the cold war expanding on the american story. Watch American History