Transcripts For CSPAN3 National World War I Memorial 20240712

My name is justin. I am the president of the National Civic arts society. We are delighted you could join us this evening to hear sabin howard resent his classical design for the National World war i memorial. Founded in 2002, the society educates and empowers our leaders in the promotion of public art and architecture worthy of a great republic. We do so by advocating for the Classical Tradition and civic design. We believe that tradition is unparalleled in its dignity, beauty, and harmony and 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 Capital and its core buildings of government. The founders socked to harken back to rome and athens and they knew classical architecture was timehonored and timeless. The National Civic arts Society Works to continue and expand upon the vision of the founders for the 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 brutalist fbi building which i call the ministry of fear. [laughter] at the same time, our National Memorials are not only not classical, they do not reflect the consensus view of the subject commemorated. For example, the Martin Luther king jr. Memorial is wholly 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 memorial to a traditional and modest president is a gargantuan deconstructionist assemblage of towering cylindrical pillars and an unintelligible woven screen that is bigger than the Hollywood Sign in los angeles. Ever since the Vietnam Veterans memorial, a memorial to an admittedly divisive war, the general trend in america is a memorials must not show signs of valor or heroism. As an egregious case in point, the united flight 93 memorial in pennsylvania failed to commemorate the heroism of the passengers on that flight. This is the case despite the fact that the 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 you will see tonight, the new world war i memorial breaks that trend. While it rightfully at knowledge is 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 yet another victim memorial. And 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 does such a design come to be selected . The answer lies in great part to the fact that the Centennial Commission for world war i chose to hold a blindly reviewed competition that unlike some other competitions, was not biased against classical design in favor of modernism and postmodernism. The competition jury was carefully selected and the leadership of the commission played a crucial role. They are to be heartily commended. And speaking of such leadership, i now turn things over to adventure out in, vicechairman the world war i Centennial Commission. Thank you. [applause] thank you, justin and thank you or the stimulating conversations we have had along the way before and during the competition and selection process. You are not here to listen to me. Sabin is much more interesting. But i want to talk to about the process that led to his election as the sculptor for the world war i memorial. This is the rendering of the overall memorial site and 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 one block from the white house. It was an existing memorial to general John J Pershing from world war i. This was the site that congress authorized as to redevelop as the National World war i memorial. And in undertaking that project, we began with three constraints. The first was, as you see, it has to be not just a memorial but a memorial within a well functioning urban park. Unlike the korean memorial or the Vietnam Memorial which are standalone memorials, here we had also served as a civic park function which helps channel the ultimate selections we made. The site itself was within a very complex urban environment. The neighbors to the site are the Willard Hotel, the washington hotel, the sherman memorial across 15th street, the department of commerce, the Wilson District building and the jw marriott. Very distinct and different urban structures, urban spaces. This site had to harmonize and be complementary to those sites. And a third constraint that was felt along the way was that we were instructed to preserve the existing park. That in itself is an interesting object lesson in design of urban landscapes. We resisted but had to ultimately yield to the inevitable. We had to work within the contours of the existing park. And that further channeled our selection. That meant that the 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 were a lot of interesting designs we looked at but ultimately they were discarded. About two of the five finalists i said i would love to see this park built but not on pennsylvania avenue. Within those constraints, we then had two key and related choices at the inception of the Memorial Development process. The first as justin alluded to what do we go by open competition or do we have some sort of prescreened competition where we had the request for portfolios and then select designers with the design to come later . Or do we choose a number of established firms with a track record in these kinds of projects and then invite them to submit their Design Concepts and proceed from there . That is what largely happened in the eisenhower memorial project. We had closely studied that. We largely agree with the critiques made about that process. And frankly, we thought the Vietnam Veterans memorial competition was a success story. And so we went on that route for a variety of reasons. The second choice was whether to put our thumb on the scale prescribe certain parameters in terms of the form or the style of the memorial at the outset of this open, blind competition. Did we want to prescribe that it would be in one particular motive for another . Would we want to prescribe whether it had certain elements are not . We opted to leave that relatively unstated. We wanted a variety, a brett of memorial concepts because we did not know what might be out there. We did not come into this prejudging that it would be a classical or a figurative design. 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 to the door. Ultimately, we received 360 submissions from around the world. I learned in this process that chinese architects enter these competitions in droves. I was very nervous that we might have wondered to chinese submissions. I suspect they were more along the Creative Solutions that defied certain laws of gravity and physics. [laughter] in the end we ended 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 a beautiful rendering of a sculpture in the round. It was exquisitely done. We paid a lot of attention to but ultimately discarded in part because it rested within an architectural form that again was not appropriate for the site. This culture itself was wrong in theme. But the skill and artistry of the sculpture was undoubted. I learned later that the sculptor was sabin howard. We had five finalists. Joe, where are you . Joe was the architect who won the design contest. [applause] and what joe did was come up with the park solution and he contemplated about 300 linear of sculptors. He photoshop reference samples to show what it might be but he did not attempt to depict a particular narrative or set of images. It was just sort of a insert sculpture here approach to the design. The jury saw the merit to that. And one of the selling points was that opportunity it afforded for a large figure of sculpture. Why was that important to us . To me and the commission it was important for a number of reasons. The first was that we are commemorating an event that happened when hundred years ago. We wanted the memorial to be of the time that it commemorated. Immemorial for the veterans that had passed since the memorial. The second is, more than the other National War Memorials we have on the mall, a world war i memorial needs a 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 different ways are both abstract memorials. The viewers do not need to be told what the wars were about or what the wars mean although i query 50 years from now what someone will make of this massive black wall with 35,000 names and scribed on it and wonder why that memorial form was chosen. But world war i, given the lack of a place that war has in the american consciousness, they needed a narrative to convey the history and the magnitude of the American Service and sacrifice in that war which is the third bloodiest war in our history. The deaths the american deaths in that event exceeding those in vietnam and korea combined. There needed to be an educational and narrative component to this memorial that conveyed that. And it needed a visual element. We have seen dozens of movies about the civil war and about picketts charge at gettysburg. We have seen dozens of movies and Television Miniseries and tv shows about world war ii. The band of brothers or the longest day or saving private ryan. We saw mash. The vietnam war came to us through our tv sets. We dont have and our collective memory that visualization of world war i. We needed to show that that war was every bit as savage as others and the veterans were every bit as heroic as any others. The educational and the visual components combined in the cinematic narrative that sabin will show you in a moment shows in an impressionistic way what the work looks like and also tell the story of the American Experience in the war and that is why joes design appealed to us. The second stage of the competition we said to joe it might help if you found a sculptor. He went to the sculptor yellow pages and found sabin howard. Joe saw what we saw. Based on his portfolio, sabin is one of the finest sculptors working today. I did not come prepared to give you his bio. He was raised in italy, which give them an unfair head start. He has studied and taught in philadelphia and elsewhere around the country. He has been a practitioner for 40 years. His work is absolutely exquisite. What we were looking at was these grecoroman nude torsos that he did. We asked them to expand from single simple forms, rather than static forms and classical poses, going to this kinetic, violent, turbulent, interlocking groups of figures that were far beyond what he had done until that point. And you what a gamble we were taking at the time. I am not sure we would have had the nerve to do it. But he has paid that act in spades. Without further ado, i will start will turn it over to sabin howard. [applause] sabin 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. As the title is so apt we named aptly named, it is a heros journey, and i had to grow with the project in order to pull something of such magnitude that would appeal to washington in the world because the world comes to washington to learn about the history of this country. I began as a classicist and worked out of the studio in the south bronx until joe sent me a polite email asking me to partner up with him and i did. I was doing figures that were very static and esoteric. I am just going to run through these so you have an idea of what i was doing. I was casting bronze mortality. A way to create something that outlasts everyone in the room. I learned my craft and my art in italy, my mothers italian, my father is american. My education came from a man from germany and that element about structure of the figure and how it is developed as an architectural system, using organic forms, is how i perceived reality. My education had a large part in how i see reality. Im showing you these because this is how i think. The way that i saw single figure was the way i was eventually able to compose compositions with 38 figures. I might add that the composition we finally came up with was not the first one. It was around the 18th one. 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, i am thinking well below the surface of the human body. There are a couple things that really informed my work. First, like edwin said, what are we depicting . Human beings. We are depicting the human experience. We are showing what it means to be human. That is a pretty deep statement because you do not see a lot of that these days. There is not a lot of figurative our art out there. Reality is enhanced by digital technology. So, this is the journey i wanted to talk to you about tonight. These are some of the drawings i was doing before, where i used actual people. This is a man, mark, from frogs neck in new york. This is the structural element that i applied my thought process. Transferring reality into the art realm. Heres the project that we finally have in front of us. We do not start here. It has been a long journey, actually, this is the first time i traveled to washington. I was really relieved. The first time i actually had a little bit of joy in the car. I am very honest. I got this project and i thought, why do i go . What do i look for where do i go . What do i look for . I went to the computer and looked for pictures of real people and what did they look like, what was the emotion that was there . 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. I began to realize that there is a Common Thread here to what i have been doing. When you get into a project like this, there are a lot of voices. Edwin suggested perhaps that i look for a figure that reminded him of the famous marine. I found this picture and sent it to him. A dialogue begins. You are not working in the studio by yourself, you are engrossed in this conversation with thousands of people and it can all be rather confusing, especially when this is a very foreign subject here. World war i was not really taught to me besides the european history class and it did not have this sort of depth that i might have for American History or other elements of history. I am looking at these images and im beginning to realize theres something really painful going on here. So this is my first attempt. This was the architectural element with sculptures underneath and that began in 2015. Then, entering with joe, i did these drawings. There are a couple things i chose to look for. A low ill level eye level, giving a dynamic quality to the figures. But this was not really the rich and we were going to take direction we were going to take. In 2016 in january, i looked a young i looked a lot younger back then. You did too, joe. It has been 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 the sculptor who created this in front of the capitol building. This took 20 years to create. The two sculptures. And he died two weeks before the unveiling. That is the testament to the energy put into making something of such importance and grander. I look 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. I needed to change my methodology of creating art so that the visitor to the memorial seeing my work would be sucked in, have a visceral reaction, and that was the task laid in front of me. Let us make something that will have a direct impact on people and they will go home and want to learn more and get involved in this in an emotional faction emotional fashion. Through this through the first three or four months of the project, i am hearing, you have to put some horses and, some tanks, barbed wire, the list is really long. Beyond the dozen a dozen. It creates confusion in an artist. Especially a topic that you are not working on and all of a sudden you are thrown into it. I went into my studio and i hear a voice in my head, and i do not always, but this day i did, and it was do what you know. I know italian renaissance art and i know the last judgment and i know the figure. By looking at that, i saw it was frightful of humidity. Figures intertwined. They are not individualistic, they are not alone, they are not alienated, they are all connected. It began to dawn on me that if i made a relief that had figures that were moving forward and backward, advancing and receding in space, it would create something way more dynamic. So i began designing and my first attempts were rather, i am searching for the word bad. Poor. [laughter] 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 versions here. I did 18 versions. I took over 12,000 pictures. I guess it was nine months. When i began to veer as i began to work when i began to do is i began to work using a cell phone using a burst, i began to do that. The actors were no longer posing on the stand, they were in movement acting something out, and then i would do the burst and get 12 frames that movement and it was telling a story. Story has always been a big part of my life as a novelist. The influence began to really creep in more and more and i began to realize this is the missing element to your work. You need to have a story behind structural aspect. You need to create a story that is universal and is also my personal story as an artist because i need to be able to get behind this. So, here we go. This is the first one that i brought. I think it was april of 2016. This is so incredibly static. A giant mess. I will enlarge it a bit so you can see and i will School Scroll across. This looks like a line at the supermarket. Never ending. [laughter] look at the posing, it is a bit stagey, right . I do 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. I know. One figure in here that has a little bit more action, and then here is the cost of war, the return home, and the final scene, my daughter. Im going to whiz through as we progress, so this is ill go slow and then we will here we start on the left with this idea remained, this idea remained. This whole section was cut out. This whole section remained. But look at what happens here. There is this pose with this model. I heard a story from james. James was a brit, his family personally involved in world war i, his greatgreatgrandfather died, his great uncle served and came back, shot his wife, shot himself, and shot his daughter. This is the gravitas you need to judge other people. Show to other people. I started posing. You see how we are getting closer. I enlarge this. Here we go. Now we are starting to get someplace. This was the beginning of where we were going. You can see the Kinetic Energy. But there is still some confusion with figures spacing each other, but heres the cost of war. Edwin has an idea, why dont you havent figured why dont you have a figure coming directly out . Theres a lot of suffering here. The end is the same. I will continue a bit faster because this lecture has a lot of elements. Until we arrived, i reversed the figure in the middle. So he is now leading the charge. And you can see how this comes more cohesive and the reason i show you the anatomical stuff is because you have a hierarchy when you construct a figure of many elements. The skeleton is the architecture as the muscles are the energy, that spirals around and forces architecture to move. In some ways, i am an architect working with organic form. When you make a single figure in many units and all those units have significant 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 . That is what i learned how to do. At the end of this nine month process, edwin and his commission no, that is not me. We got to a drawing. I remember sitting with edwin at barnes noble down on 14th street in new york city and edwins eyes ok, no ahead into the drawing edwin says, ok, go ahead and do the drawing. 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 would not because they are so in comfortable. So uncomfortable. A lot of looking at yourself in the mirror and asking how do i improve here . You need to hold onto your idea of what the vision is and also at the same time, work with them. This does not happen often because artists will given and say, yes, yes, yes to everybody, and the whole vision falls apart. Im very stubborn and have a clear vision at times, and this was a balance between a democratic concept of concepts and ideas from the group, and trying to hold onto a vision. That is a tricky subject to deal with. Here is the final image. Lets go now to alright. So. I am going to run through the next slides to show you what this first idea what the camera does. Do you see that . That is what we are doing. We are capturing a single image and this is how Technology Comes into play with the image capturing. It is about movement, nothing is static. Everything is vertical. Now all of a sudden, there is a diagonal to the figures. The more it increases, the more the Kinetic Energy increases. The higher the feeling of energy is. In our relief, we have a plethora of feelings and emotions that describe the war. Humanity. Who we are as human beings. Here is the story that my wife informed me one day at the breakfast table called a heros journey. It is a soldiers journey. Call to adventure. The next section is crossing into the threshold to enter a challenge, temptation, heres the war, abyss and death is central, followed by transformation. Atonement and then return. That return comes fullcircle. 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. She said, the heros journey is in every single culture in the world, every time of the world, and there is not a single part of society that has not used this template for telling a tale of the hero. This is a diagram of a soldiers journey. You can see a clear beginning, middle, and end. You can see the x. It is a symbol of transformation and change, and that was something that i 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. It is ironic that this project, which follows the war 100 years later, his figurative is figurative. It took on more meaning than just being a soldier in family going to work and family going to war. It is allegory. You have three stories. Family, the United States, and a mythological story as well. After the drawing was done, we needed to make a sculpture. I traveled 9000 miles away to create that sculpture over six months. In so doing, i had to start again with a different system to create the first market we reshot the figures. Numbered each of the figures, and then began something which i never delved in before. The Digital World of the figure. I did everything traditionally. Had a model, lighting, tools used by sculptures years ago, and clay. I did not know how to do this program on the computer. Digital moviemaking company they had a full boutique, organization, where you could hire sculptors. Mold the peace after it was sculpted, cast it, and ship it. From that, we went through and discussed with them, how do you deal with facing the figures together and not losing the proportions of the drawing . The eye level is around the knee, so every thing above is reduced spatially from below. The figures look much larger than they actually are. We did billing and tests in the first month to figure out the depth of the relief. These milling tests explained to us that if we wanted something highly emotional, we had to go deeper for greater impact. Also, if this is to be seen from 175 feet away, you have to do something that has really dark darks and light lights so it pops off the background. So working in the template of the roman sarcophagus and some of those are 8, 9 feet long, that is when i was working with what i was working with. This is the final print. From here, we digitalized that and cut all the figures up into 120 sections. On hundred 20 sections of plastic were shipped to china, printed in china and shipped back to new zealand where they were molded. This is the pink stuff. Not frosting on the cake. And then transferred to a clay. It was then assembled, and these are digital, so they have a mannequin like flavor to them. I am going to go faster through this because i want to show you more of the actual monument. To give you an idea of how laborintensive it is to create Something Like this this is the scale. Those are all the hands and guns. Saul has the recurrent fullscale this all has to occur at fullscale. That is the digital fingerprint. That is what most art it is 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 human hand had done it. That is me after 71 days. [laughter] yes. What is that thing you said . The thousand yard stare . [laughter] anyway, i had ptsd, but not to the same level as the men on the battlefield. But the intensity of this will play with your head and scribble your great scramble your brain. This is cut into sections, d assembled, and you now cast a resin and reassemble this. We spraypainted that and sent t his back to the u. S. For a meeting, 2018 . In february. February. That didnt go so well. We then did a bunch of other meetings with the commission on fine arts that lasted into the following year, and i was asked to reduce the relief and in reducing the relief to the eventual 60 feet, the composition got tighter and more energetic. Again, i looked toward technology. How do we do this quickly . I had four months to redo the entire composition in start the process of thinking ahead to the monument. I went to this place in the u. K. , the most cuttingedge foundry in europe. This is a machine that sets up 160 cameras around the model. You put the model on the inside. You pose them. Now from here, you get a print that its a 3d image. This same moment historically as we had with photography was invented, except now threedimensional. People that are classically trained are saying this is the death of us all. I will argue it is not. This enables us to make larger projects that have to be driven by traditional values and the ability to use your hands, your heart, and your brain to create art. The education i received is invaluable to use this technology to create things that are really dynamic and human. That is the print on the screen, the amount of detail you can get the machine. From the machine. It is a temptress. Deceptive, because it is all surface. Not a lot to do with structure. Not a lot to do with structure. Structure is what gives feeling and the sense of humanity to sculptures and art. This is cut in our and reassembled this is cut in half and reassembled. We did a this was a test print. This was the scale that we showed to the fine arts commission. This was the final assembly of last year in march, and this was cast in resin. It was shipped to washington from the u. K. So from here, we eventually passed through the commission on fine arts and i am grateful of that. I would never want to go through that again. I learned a lot from it. And i think this is an interesting project and i want to jump into the last segment of this and show you the actual memorial being built. There is a sense of sacredness to the project where the figures are slightly overscale. They are 66. Some are slightly larger because they are not standing upright. They are crouching, so they are around 72. They are bursting at the seams of the frame. They are largerthanlife. When you walk along from left to right and you look at these groups and scenes, you realize that theres something heroic and monumental of this achievement of these men going into battle and then returning. It speaks well of humanity. It also speaks of heroism, that we are able to rise to the occasion faced with great odds. That sits very well with the way i was working before, with creations like figures creations of figures like apollo or mars, or some of the female figures like aphrodite. This is the actual memorial milled out at the foundry. It looks great in the photo from a distance, but i will show you closer images. It is still mannequin like. This is the first print and this gets shipped and arrives in new jersey at my studio in inglewood where it is unloaded and reassembled. The studio also was created to make use of Natural Light so that it would not be sculpted under incandescent light. It would have the impact outside because it was created in the same sort of environment. This is the studio in progress. We are working from models. Most people are working today from photographs or computer screens. It gets dangerous when you do that because those are flat images. Those are references that have no feeling that do not breathe, that do not have any sense of expansion. When i look at a model, i am losing my anatomical knowledge to take that, translate that into an art form, and one of the big things i am looking for is how to 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 it is all mapped out. You have all the sections. I map out the figure using my anatomical knowledge for discerning what i see and when i do that, each one of those sections presses out into space. That is a symbol for who we are as human beings. We are bursting with life. We have energy that is pushing out. When we die, the energy or the pressure is gone and on the one hand i am going to make an analogy a grape turns into a raisin. It shrinks onto itself, it collapses. The sculpture, for my concept, is about this massive amount of energy pushing out, not only at the viewer, but progressing toward the future from left to right. So we sculpt from life 40 hours a week. The other sculptors are learning and we are on target in terms of time by next august. We will be sending the first section to be cast at the foundry. I wanted to show you it has been 12 weeks of sculpting now. For example, in the initial scene with 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 his body as he pulled forward to join his comrades and orbs in arms. These are the attention to details that will be a narrative for the visitor to understand the story told through artistic merit. Not a book, but a visual. That is rare. The book has become more important than a visual format. This is the father figure. 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. In the jaw. This is one of the models. They are transformed into these characters. This is another model. This is a mother figure in the initial scene. The diagramming i talked to you about, the idea of convexity. You do not think that, but if you do, youre pressing things in. That is what we get. That is the digital part. It is a mannequin. No energy. But it is a fantastic armature to put the clay on and begin the artistic process at scale. We went to a taylor tailor and recreated the costumes that were used in that day and age. And then we applied clay with our heads our hands. We crated diagrams, rhythms and movements that are translations from reality. What you are seeing right there is to tell the story. It is done not for chanel commercial beauty sake, but to tell a story that will impact the eighth grader when he walks by so that he will get interested in some thing that happened 100 years ago. This is the clay from an afternoon of chopping. It is reformed. To show you a little bit about the rhythms and diagrams, you can see how for example, the deltoid, tricep of extensors. These curves are very much the way art was onestop once taught and has now been eliminated in art school. Figurative art is being regulated to a three hour block in a nonstudents career an art students career. You see the dynamic action . Nothing is our models are suffering right now. They are not just standing around. They are actually in motion. There is a lot of grumbling going on, but it is working. The idea of an alteration. The way that the cast old is. The glutes and their tightness. The quads and the sense of a rib cage. How the arm flows out from the back. That is what we are looking at. This is me touching teaching one of my assistants. This is the template to play forward. This is a native American Indian from the cherokee tribe my wife and i went out to find a native american who would come model for us. And then one of the people who i really admire and respect and hope to play forward the message that he left with us, but there is a sense of great dignity, even to the foot. And this back. The fullness of the energy that is there, that is what washington needs from my viewpoint. A sense of dignity because art is representation of your culture. And i do not want to be represented by cinderblocks. So 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. The story gets a lot deeper. Heres the wife who is also an allegory for america. We were reluctant to enter this war. Here is the husband, who also represent america and the hero. 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 this has just started, but if i show you the faces, they begin to tell a story. The wife is the beginning of beauty. We are not there yet. There is a fierce charge in the soldier and this brotherhood of arms figure carrying the anger and hatred of war, and the aggression necessary to win. These soldiers are different types. They are not all generic. This man was selected specifically for his ethnic background. An africanamerican here as well wearing a french helmet. The attention to detail is beginning to come out at the scale. The cartridges are 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 up the foundry and the battle scene was the next shipment. This is what we used to put this together. Do you understand how deep this is on so many levels . My wife act as my object manager on all the logistics involved in these projects. Huge. I am doing the artistic elements, shes doing the business part. The amount of detail to get this done is incredible. The figure in the middle is full photogrammetry. That is a photograph and we use the same model that we had used in the initial drawings, except now it is threedimensional. That will now get chopped. It will be slightly higher when it is cast and shown. That is the battle scene that arrived with the clay on top. You have millimeters of clay and pure milling with no clay. This is the studio. With the battle scene. And that is the central figure representing dan daly. This is the native american that i showed you photographs before from the cherokee nation. And this is my special tool. A 1. 25 kmart brush. What you know, what your education is creates your reality through your perception. We put the composition together and this is the first 18 figures. It is really interesting because i have not seen anything like this lately. I am really excited to share this with you tonight because i am hoping this is the beginning of something new in the art world. Justin, i want to thank you for having me and edwin, thank you for picking me, sort of. Still working that out. And thank you joe for asking me to be your partner. And my wife are standing by me. [applause] [indiscernible] if you have too many things going on, it becomes confusing for the viewer. I needed to come up with something that really you cannot handle everything. There are so many different elements. Could have put the enemy and, but then the story becomes more complicated. Did you have to sort that out . It was pretty quick in the beginning. It is a question. I wanted to make something easily understood by all. And then there are many leaders, too many layers, too. I thought putting the enemy and would cause confusion. Might be a silly question, but where does all the money come from . By the end of the project, federal funds found their way to the memorial roughly speaking, i would state two thirds private, one third public. Private funds have been raised principally from High Net Worth individuals and foundations that have a particular interest in the messaging and this history being commemorated here. Right here. Thank you. This may also be a question for edwin. I absolutely the location is perfect right by the white house, the treasury, the commerce department, can you talk about may any restoration of the park of Pershing Park . I would not want this magnificent sculpture to be somewhere where it might not smell the best or have something this grand be diminished by not a good park. That is how federal funding is finding its way in. We are required under the preservation act to preserve the existing park. Much of the design work, we are 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 become dilapidated over the last 3540 years and we should not have to pay for that. The park service with some help from people on capitol hill that we know agreed. They are kicking in money, adding to deferred maintenance. When we were redoing the plantings because trees were planted with inadequate soil volumes and whatnot, that was paid by the park service. When we were replacing mechanical and plumbing systems, that is paid for by the park service. The second half is the maintenance. Under the commemorative works act, the memorial sponsor has to provide a 10 endowment. 10 of the Construction Costs on top has to be paid over to the park service and that pays for big picture maintenance. Someone breaks off a piece of the rifle or Something Like that. There is a lightning strike. Who knows what . As to the daily maintenance, which has suffered over the past years, my day job is with this commission which built Pershing Park in the first place. We built the world war ii memorial. The korean war memorial. We maintain all the cemeteries overseas. We are the Gold Standard when it comes to maintenance of the sites if we if you have been to our cemetery in normandy. Because congress likes us a whole lot more than we like the park service, and it is easier for us to get funds for the memorial then it is for the park service to get funds for an urban park in washington, d. C. That is where federal funding is coming into the project so that the site lives up to the sculpture. But the site honors the memorial we are putting into it. A handful of very competent sculptors like mckenzie, a canadian that worked in britain, and the sculptor who did the world war ii memorial sculpture in kansas city. Your work is so much more ambitious than any of those projects. But did you use those in your memory bank as inspiration, as touchstones for your work . Thank you for that question. It is an important element to my work that i follow in the footsteps. I did make a trip specifically to london from the foundry to look at the sculpture at paddington station. One of the things that impressed me about it was the proportions of the figure and how block like they were. There were reminiscent of the cube system that michelangelo used for rib cage to give it a heavyset structural vitality that would last through many many ages. Its power. Also a sense of a static energy that is breathing and living. The other element that was important from that piece that would that i was intrigued by, how the texture was not smoothed over like a lot of what we are seeing today in modern times. It had a lot more emotion in drama to it and i felt that was fitting to a memorial and that is one of the things i am playing forward, where the actual application of the clay enhances the story so it has more movement and vitality that gives it a quality. That was one artist i looked at carefully. Just a caveat for edwin i just restored the first commemorative fountain in america. Which has been in storage for 70 years. Admittedly on view in the philadelphia museum, and to my mind most vulnerable part of monuments like this other water features. Unlike roman fountains, which are gravity fed, the mechanisms in this country, we have a great deal of problems. This is a very simplified water feature that will have a better future. On the other hand, the one at the Smithsonian Museum has been decommissioned and given up trying to get that to work satisfactorily. Having seen the construction designs, the water system is not as simple as we would like. One parameter we did it this newly originally put in was no water because we knew of those problems and we knew that the park service hates to take care of water. By the time that we got to the commission on fine arts, we had the original blueprints and on the back of the sculpture, its its on a freestanding wall that is within the pool. We will get there. It is a question of when. We are anxious to break ground on the park itself. Once we do that, the park will be brought back up to speed. We will put up temporary imagery like the scaffolding you see. Sabin says he will take five years to finish this. He will take three and a half. Shes the boss. Probably. We have spent a lot of time on lighting design. The lighting is going to be spectacular. Electric. We did a lighting test. Usually a 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 three quarters so that all the figures pop out from the background and the story becomes even more impactful at night and from my perspective, it will become more genetic and that is the money shot that will be shown when the memorial it is really strong. One final question. Can you tells about the process about getting the historical details right . I know you had a lot of help from military historians. As you know, commissioner, sabin has worked closely with the commission throughout the process. Theyll bring expertise to american material culture at that age. Several months ago, sabin came into our office. We went there entire storyboard of the piece, picked up every area where they needed to be attentive to historical accuracy. Rob and mike would come up to his studio periodically. If he is going to send off the first section to the foundry and artist, they may be in a or june, we would go up there and say, those buttons need to be changed. One thing we never noticed, but we did notice when it was 6. 5 feet high, those cartridge belts that you see at that point, it became obvious, those are deflated. They have to be filled out. We pointed that out to sabin and he is already working on that. We are legions of nitpickers out there. We want to be faithful to the troops as they wear. We are putting a lot of attention to that. We also used original uniforms that saw combat. In fact, i saw pictures in the Salvation Army uniform that i got mike, that had pictures from home in it still. That adds to the truth of the project because the cloth actually folds the same way it did originally. Same truth. Please join me in thanking sabin for a wonderful presentation. [applause] it is a strong term, but i think we will see a masterpiece in the making. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] this is American History tv, featuring events, interviews, archival films, and visits to museums and historic places. Exploring our nations past every weekend on cspan3. I believe we should be stronger than we now live. We should have a stronger military force. We can increase our strength all over the world. I am the president , im doing something that is right. Something that is for the purpose of defending the security of this country. Years ago, americans watched the first ever televised debate between john f. Kennedy and richard nixon. Sunday morning, we will look back at the event with a University Professor and a live discussion on how the debates came to be. The issues, the candidates, and how the debate set the tone for future president ial campaigns. At 9 00 a. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3. The first president ial debate between donald trump and joe bidens tuesday night at 9 00 eastern from cleveland. Watch live on cspan. He is recklessly campaigning against this vaccine. It is really reckless. It is for political reasons. His whole deal is catastrophic shutdown. The president knew back in february that this was an extremely dangerous, communicable disease. Think about it. , how many empty chairs around those dinner tables . Because of his negligence and selfishness . Watch the first debate live from cleveland tuesday night on cspan. Stream live or ondemand on our next Boston College professor , Heather Cox Richardson teaches a class on the new roles women assumed in the workforce and in politics during the late 19th century. She describes gains women made in fields like nursing, teaching and social work. She also discusses the growth of political organizations run by women that focused on issues like prohibition and womens suffrage. Prof. Richardson lets go ahead and start. As you know the theme of this course comes from the idea that the civil war dramatically changes American History because what it really does is it destroys everything everybody believed about the relationship between america and the american government