The art and politics of statues

Matt Glenn’s sculpture studio is a lively place, jammed with works in progress. In one corner, a life-size clay figure of Johnny Cash, guitar over his shoulder, is serenading statues of Jackie Robinson, Elon Musk and Mr. Toad from “The Wind in the Willows.” A Vietnam War soldier stands guard over them all. It’s like the most interesting social event you’ve never been to, crowded into an unassuming building that once housed his father’s auto body shop. A genial older man in bronze sits on a park bench, smiling and taking it all in.
“His wife wanted to still be able to sit with him,” explains Glenn, a tall 53-year-old with a quarterback’s build and dark hair down past his ears. Glenn is a sculptor-for-hire, a 19th-century trade that is enjoying a 21st-century revival. Every figure in his crowded, rather messy studio in Provo, Utah, tells a story. Johnny Cash was commissioned for a music museum in Nashville, but when the pandemic hit, the order was paused. So were several others.
A few months later, protesters began targeting statues around the world, vandalizing them with graffiti and demanding that certain monuments be torn down outright. The casualties included not only Confederate leaders from the Civil War, but historical figures ranging from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln. Not even vaunted figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant were immune from protesters’ wrath.
Maybe the age of statues was finally coming to an end, Glenn thought. He wondered if it was time to close up shop, abandoning his lifelong dream of making a living as a sculptor. In fact, the opposite happened. New orders began pouring in; suddenly, it seemed like everyone wanted a statue. “I think those old sculptures have sat in place for decades without people noticing them — it was just a man on a horse, not someone who’s a racist,” Glenn says. “But then it made people think, why not memorialize some other people who’ve done great things? They don’t even have to be famous.”
Glenn’s company, Big Statues, has never been busier. The air in his shop smells sharply of solvents and plaster dust, and one must tread carefully or risk overturning one of many mysterious tubs of colored goo. When I visit, he’s juggling some 20-odd different projects at various stages of completion. It is an eclectic mix, ranging from a pair of Tuskegee Airmen to George W. Bush to Emmett Till to Chief Little Turtle, a Miami tribal leader who defeated a force of 1,400 federal troops in what is now Ohio. Coming soon: a figure of Charles C. Rich, an early apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and another of Rosie the Riveter.
The phenomenon of statues coming down is a culture-wide movement about which much has been written. But less attention has been paid in recent years to the statues that are going up — from small-town parks to the highest reaches of the art world.
“The monument is alive and well, and it is a global phenomenon,” says the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley. Best known as a painter who recreates classical styles and poses, Wiley has recently begun creating monumental bronze sculptures that depict ordinary people in heroic poses. His figures have been exhibited everywhere from the Venice Biennale in Italy to downtown Crenshaw, in Los Angeles.
Wiley’s interest in bronze sculpture was sparked in 2016 when he visited Richmond, Virginia, and saw the enormous statues of horse-mounted Confederate generals that still lined Monument Avenue. He’d grown up in South Central Los Angeles, which lacks that kind of post-Civil War street furniture, and the unfamiliar figures triggered a visceral reaction. Representing men who had fought to prolong slavery, they reminded him of the statues he’d seen on a childhood trip to the Soviet Union in 1989, when he was 12 years old, on a youth exchange program. Similarly, he says, they felt like “symbol(s) of dominance and terror.”
He responded by sculpting “Rumors of War,” a towering equestrian statue with a Black man in the saddle, wearing Nikes and sporting stylish dreads. After its 2019 debut in Times Square, that piece was moved to Richmond for permanent installation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, not far from where the generals stood. At the unveiling, Wiley noticed how elderly Black men and women reacted. “They had tears in their eyes,” he remembers. “It wasn’t an intellectual exercise, it wasn’t a political exercise, it was literally the addressing and redressing of a past and present that was designed to menace, designed to rob them of human dignity, and to populate their psyche with a sense of brokenness.”
Richmond’s Confederate generals were eventually taken down, in 2020, one outcome of a broader national reckoning on race and racism in many areas of society. That was not Wiley’s preference. He sees intrinsic value in statues, in the stories they tell and the beauty they often bring into our public spaces, even when they represent a person or idea we may oppose. “I hate the idea of melting them down and forgetting where we come from,” he says. “They should be part of our legacy, part of our archive, and our continued reserve of national memories that we can draw upon for inspiration.”
“I think that the best thing to do is to respond with more statues,” Wiley says. He believes today’s artists should be invited to create newer works that better reflect contemporary values — and the ideals of the people who will be viewing those works. With “Rumors of War,” Wiley started a series that will culminate with a figure of a Black woman astride a horse, riding off to battle, set to be unveiled on Los Angeles’ famous Crenshaw Boulevard this fall as part of “Destination Crenshaw,” described as the largest Black public art project in the United States.
About 15 years ago, Glenn found himself at a crossroads. He had been working in real estate development, and had just finished a big project, a hotel in Nauvoo, Illinois. Now he was wondering what to do next. He had always been interested in making art. He borrowed a sizable lump of clay from another sculptor, and one evening, he pulled it out of the cabinet and started playing around. By dawn, he had fashioned a bust of Porter Rockwell, bodyguard of early Latter-day Saint leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
“Where’d you get that?” his wife asked in the morning.
“I made it,” he said.
He had found a new career. That clay model was just a first step toward the bronze that held a magic allure for him. “When you first see a bronze sculpture, your first instinct is to reach out and touch it,” Glenn says. “It’s energizing. It’s grounding.” He hands me a bronze ingot, like a large, heavy coin. It’s solid, slightly rough and weighty; it feels electric in my hand.
It was a bold leap for Glenn to try and make a go at a craft whose heyday was a century or two in the rearview mirror. Could he carve a niche for himself in an artform once practiced by such renowned artists as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and Utah’s own Mahonri Young? Could he accomplish that in an age when all art — and especially public art, which is often the case for statuary — is often viewed with as much suspicion as it is respect? These were big questions for somebody else to answer. An artist makes art.
The process of creating a bronze sculpture is essentially the same as it has been for 3,000 years: The sculptor creates a clay model of the figure that is used to create a ceramic mold, into which liquid bronze is poured and then allowed to cool. Glenn loves the first stage, working by hand: “There’s something very therapeutic about it. I get into a rhythm, and if I don’t have any outside distractions like a clock or a phone I can go for hours, as long as I have a Dr. Pepper and an energy bar.” Unfortunately for him, the sculptor’s art has been transformed by technology.
I follow Glenn into an office, where his colleague Dana Hansen frowns into a computer monitor. On the screen is a man in a baseball cap — legendary catcher Johnny Bench. With a few clicks, he can change the shape of Bench’s face, the texture of his skin, the length of his nose or any other characteristic, using a 3D modeling program called ZBrush. “We’re able to go into the software and just like with clay, quite literally start sculpting him,” Hansen says, clicking back and forth between his model and old photographs of Bench, who played for the Cincinnati Reds from 1967 to 1983. “The nice thing is there’s an ‘undo’ button.”
Once the image is finished, the file is sent to a 3D printer to create a miniature model from plant-based resin. If that looks good, a life-size model is fashioned from Styrofoam blocks, using a CNC machine. The foam model is then covered in clay, and Glenn puts on the finishing touches — adding texture, adjusting facial expressions, making the subject look more lifelike. Only then does it go off to the foundry to be cast. “It makes everything a lot quicker,” Glenn says. But there is still a role for the artist’s hand. “I’ll always go back and put my hands on everything. If you let the software do it all, you end up with something that looks like a mannequin.”
Sculpting is a complex art with high consequence. If Glenn makes a mistake, that error could quite literally end up being cast in bronze. He studies diligently, going to seminars on technique and anatomy; he is obsessive about measurement and proportion. One wall is lined with a dozen spooky-looking plaster face masks. I have no idea who they are until Glenn points out that they represent David Letterman, Charlton Heston, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Kiefer Sutherland, Halle Berry and other famous actors. Just the faces, no hair. He uses them for reference — “when I’m doing a sculpture of someone who’s in the vicinity of that face, to get the zygomatic arch or the occipital arch right, the lips right.”
Two years ago, the hard work paid off when he landed a dream assignment: to create statues of Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb and former President George W. Bush for the Little League stadium and hall of fame in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Bush was present at the unveiling, and Glenn was nervous; he sat next to the former president, who is himself an artist, at the Little League Classic game between the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles. Bush thanked him, he says, “for not making me look like Alfred E. Neuman,” referring to the longtime face of Mad Magazine.
Bush may strike some as a controversial figure, although the darker aspects of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that started during his tenure in the White House may have lost some of their bite in light of political developments in recent years. But that makes him an interesting case study. There seems to be a consensus that by memorializing a person in bronze, we elevate them in some fashion and integrate their lives into our collective memory. But who should we remember in this way? And how do we make sure that portrayal is honest and uplifting?
“We’re looking now at who should we commemorate, and how should we commemorate them,” says Alex von Tunzelmann, an independent historian and author of “Fallen Idols,” a history of statues that have been put up, and then taken down, at various times in history. It wasn’t that long ago that people were pulling down statues of Vladimir Lenin and Saddam Hussein. She is particularly intrigued by the new vogue for depicting ordinary people, or famous people brought down to the level of the spectator. “There’s all sorts of memorials going on that are brilliant.”
The latter happens to be Glenn’s forte. He’s even done a sculpture of a beloved neighborhood everyman in Manchester, New Hampshire. And he knows this medium has the power to illuminate the historical record, if not to right its wrongs. That’s why the Emmett Till project hit him differently. Photos of the slight, young teenager reminded Glenn of his own sons, one of whom was the same age at the time. “He was only 14 years old,” Glenn says.
When Till’s family took him to visit Mississippi from their home in Chicago in 1955, he was profoundly unprepared to navigate the South under Jim Crow. He was lynched after an interaction with a store cashier. His death provoked widespread outrage and helped to spark the Civil Rights Movement, inspiring Rosa Parks and contributing to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Back at the computer, Hansen makes a few clicks, and in an instant, we’re looking into the wide-eyed, half-smiling face of a young Emmett Till — soon to be immortalized in bronze.
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.