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Memorial. It is being constructed on pennsylvania avenue. The National Civic art society hosted this event and provided the video. 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 present 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 ught 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. For instance, there is a museum, the hirschhorn which looks like a gun lit bunker and that 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 come the new world war i memorial rakes breaks that trend. While it rightfully acknowledges the magnitude of the suffering and 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 edwin fountain, vicechairman the world war i Centennial Commission. Thank you. [applause] justin, thank you, justin, and thank you for the stimulating conversations we 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 his selection 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 immortal which are memorials,veterans 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 adth 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 one or two 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 the sculpture itself was wrong in fame but the skill and , artistry of the sculpture was undoubted. I learned later that the sculptor was sabin howard. We rejected his omission. His submission. 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 it appealed to the commission as well. 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. That happened 100 years ago. We wanted the memorial to be of the time that it commemorated. Veterans hadof the passed. We wanted it to be recognizable to the participants in the conflict that it was commemorating. The second is, more than the other National War Memorials 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 55,000 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. That inspired further selfeducation. 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 do not have in 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 what the war looked like and tells 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 went out and found a sculptor. Joe went to the sculptural yellow pages. Saw, which based on his portfolio, he is one of the finest sculptors working in the world today. I did not come prepared to give you his bio. He was raised in italy, which gave him an unfair start. He has studied and taught in philadelphia. He has been a practitioner for 30 years. It is his work is absolutely exquisite. We were looking at torsos that he did. Extending from single forms at ended up being a 38 year work, rather than static forms in very classical purposes, going to this very kinetic, violent, turbulent, interlocking groups of figures that were far beyond what he had done until that point. Had i known what a gamble we were taking at the time, i do not know that we would have had the nerve to do it. Do, it further do to will turn it over to sabin howard. [applause] sabin all right. And you for coming tonight. You a taste of where i started and where my mind was before the project, and where it progressed through the project because i was unprepared for this project when it began. Named,title is so aptly it is a heros journey and i really had to grow with the project to pull off something of such magnitude that would appeal to not only washington but the world because the world comes to washington to learn about the history of this country. I began as a crisis and worked out of a studio in the south bronx until joe sent me a polite email, asking me to partner up with them. I did. I was doing figures that were very static and a satiric esoteric. A bronze beets mortality. Beats mortality. I learned my craft and my art in italy. I am half italian. My father is american. My education came from a man who came out of germany. Structurent about the of the figure and how the figure is developed, as an architectural system, using organic forms is how i perceived reality. Of how i large part see reality. This is how i think. The way i saw a single figure was way i was eventually able to compose a composition 38 figures. It was not the first one. It was around the 18th one. Never quite a lot of meetings that i drove back to new york to 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 and foremost, 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 a lot of that is days. Everything is very abstract. Enhanced bys digital technology. This is what i wanted to talk about tonight. These are some of the drawing that i was doing before, where i used actual people. This is the structural element i applied to my thought process. This is a way of observing reality and transforming it into that art realm. Here is the project that we finally have in front of us. We did not start here. It has been a long journey. I did not have to go to a bureaucratic eating. I was really relieved. I am very honest. I got this project, and i thought of a do i go . What do i look for . Of creatingame way my methodology that i had for the previous 30 years. I went to the computer and i looked for pictures of real people. What did they look like . What was the emotion that was there . I started finding imagery that made me realize how human war was. The girl with the hat reminds me of my daughter. The soldiers remind me of my friends that iraq time with. There is a Common Thread to what i have been doing. When you get into a project like this, there are a lot of voices. He suggested that i look for a figure like the famous marine. A dialogue begins. You are not working in the studio by yourself you are engrossed in this conversation with people and it can be rather using. This is a very foreign subject to you. It was not really taught me aside from european history class. It did not have the depth that i might have for other elements of history. I am looking at these images and beginning to realize that there is something really painful going on here. Attempt. My first this was the architectural element. That began in 2015. Then, entering with joe, i did drawings. There are a couple things that i chose and for. Dynamic look to the figures. This was not really the direction that we were going to take. In 2016, in january. I looked a lot younger back then. Been an epic voyage. Edwin and i talked a bit. One of the things that inspired him was this piece by the sculptor that created this in front of the capitol building. ,his took 20 years to create the two sculptures. He died two weeks before the unveiling. That is a testament to what is put into something of such importance and grandeur. This is not what i was doing. I was doing something that was and not really available to the general public, so i needed to change my methodology of creating art, so the person or visitors see my work would be sucked in and have a visceral reaction. That was the task that was laid in front of me. Something that will have a direct impact on people. They will go home and they will want to learn more and get involved in this in an emotional fashion. This, i guess the first three or four months of a to put, i hear, you need some horses and, some tanks in, some barbed wire. Beyond a dozen. Confusion a lot of and an artist. Especially on a topic are not working on, and then you are thrown into it. I hear this voice in my head. I do not always hear voices in my head, but this day i did. Know. D, do what you i know italian renaissance art. Saw thist it, i pretzel of humanity, all of these figures, intertwined. They are not individualistic. They are all connected. It dawned on me that if i made a relief that had figures that were moving forward and backward, advancing and receding, it would create something way more dynamic. I began designing. Bad, poor. Tempt were this wasow you my first attempt. I want to show you the process. It will take a second to load. Versions. Ofook over 12,000 pictures her ninemonth. What i began to do was, i began to work, using a cell phone, where i would use the burst when you press a button and it captures the movement. The actors were no longer posing on the stand, they were in it, acting something out and i would the burst and get 12 frames through the move went. Story has been a really big heart. In influence began to creep more and more. I began to realize, that is the missing element. You need to create a story that myuniversal and it is also personal story, as an artist, as an artist, because i need to be able to get behind it. This is the first one that i brought in april of 2016. This is just so incredibly static. It is a giant mess. I will enlarge it a little bit. This is like a line at the supermarket. It is just never ending and there is no meaning. Here is the family. They are going off to war. Look at the posing. Is a little bit stingy stagey. This is the battle scene. Come on. That is the battle scene. One figure in here has a little more action. Here is the cost of war and the return home. The final scene is my daughter. To whiz through, as we progress. Slow. Go here, we are starting to get a little bit that are on the left remained. Idea , this whole section was cut out. Some of them remain, but look at what happens. There is a pose with this model. I heard a story from james. Brit. Is a his greatgreatgrandfather died. His great uncle served and came back. He shot his wife, shot himself and shot his daughter. That is when i began to realize, this is the gravitas that you need to show to other people. Without going through too much posing. I started how we are getting closer. Ok. Here we go. Now we are starting to get someplace. This was the beginning of where you are going. Energy see that kinetic but there is still some confusion with figures acing each other. Here is the cost of war. There is a lot of suffering here. Bitll continue little faster because the lecturer has a lot of elements. Reversed theved, i figure in the middle. He is now leading the charge. You can see how this becomes more cohesive. The reason i showed you the anatomical stuff is you have a hierarchy. The muscles are the energy that spirals around and forces the architecture to move. I am an architect working with organic form. When you make a single form with several unit, they each have their own importance. It has to create one unit. Here you have to create one composition with one element. How do you do that . That is what i learned how to do. At the end of this ninemonth process with edwin and his commission that is not me. We got to a drawing. I remember sitting with edwin at the barnes noble down on 14th street, union square, new york city. Edwin said, go ahead and do the drawing. I was so relieved that we had gotten to this place, but i want to say that as an artist, it is critical to go through this process of commissions because it takes you out of yourself and forces you to grow in ways that you will not because they are so uncomfortable. There is a lot of looking in the mirror. There are a dozen people at the table and you need to hold onto what your idea of the vision is and at the same time, work with them. That does not happen very often because sometimes artist will give in and say yes to everybody and the whole vision falls apart. I am very stubborn and i have a clear vision. This was a balance between a lot ofc concept of concepts and ideas from a group and trying to hold on to a vision. Here is our final image. All right. Im going to run through the next slides to show you this burst idea with a camera and what it does. Do you see that . That is what we are doing. We are capturing a single image. This is how Technology Comes into play with the image capturing. It is about movement. Nothing is static. They are all vertical. Now there is a diagonal to the figures. Higher the feeling of energy. In our release, we have a plethora of feelings and emotions that described a war, humanity and who we are as human beings. Here is the story that my wife informed me at the fist table, called a heros journey. Adventure. L to crossxt section is you the threshold and enter into a challenge of temptation. A base and death. It is the center of the composition followed by transformation, atonement and then return. Return comes fullcircle. I did not know i was doing this. My wife educates me quite a bit. Heros journey is in every single culture of the world and every timeframe of the world. This is a diagram of a soldiers journey. You can see there is a very creamy very clear beginning, middle and end. It was something that i had not planned. Obviously, world war i transformed the planet, the world, and society on so many levels. It was the end of figurative art. The end of modernism. Projectonic that this is figurative. Also took on more meaning than just being a a family going to war. It is an allegory. Three different stories. A family story, and allegory of the u. S. , and a mythological story as well. Done, we drawing was needed to make a sculpture. I traveled 9000 miles away to make that sculpture over six months. With ao start again with 12 inchtem high figures. All the figures in the round. We numbered each of the figures. Nd began something it is the Digital World of the figure. I have done everything traditionally. I had a model, lighting, tools that were used 12,000 years ago and play. I did not know how to do programming on the computer, so i did up a digital moviemaking company because they had organization where you could , mold thel theres piece after a lisko did, cast it and ship it. From that, we went through and i had to discuss with them, how do you deal with placing figures together on a screen and not losing the proportions of the drawing . The eye level is around the knees, so everything above is reduced spatially from below. The figures look much larger than they actually are. Test in theng and first month to figure out the depth of the. Tests explained very quickly that if we wanted think highly emotional, we had to go deeper for greater impact. Also, if this is to be seen from 175 away, you need to do darksing that has dark and light lights. Working in the template of the roman sarcophagus. Some of those are eight or nine feet long. It might have 25 years. That is what i was working with. This was my final print. And cut alled that the figures up into 120 section. They 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 a cake. Transferred to a clay. It was assembled. These are digital, so they had a very manichaean like flavor to likedicane mannequin flavor to them. Those are all the hand and guns. This all has to reoccur at fullscale. Do you see how slick this all looks . Fingerprint. That is the digital fingerprint. That is what most art is that is figurative today. It is done using a mechanical device, the computer, to mill out the figures. Something is lost. This and i sculpted for 71 days straight, and i transferred it into a feeling that an artist or human hand had done. That is me after 71 days. Yes. What is that thing that you said . The thousand yards share . In a way, i had ptsd. Not to the same level as men on the battlefield, but it will play with your head and scramble your brain. These are my final pictures. Sections. T into go through the same process of molding. And reassemblein this. We spraypainted that and sent u. S. Ink to the february 2018. That did not go so well. Of meetingsa bunch that lasted until the following year. Then i was asked to reduce the relief. Reducing the relief from 75 feet to our original 60 feet, the composition got tighter, more dramatic and energetic. Again, i looked towards technology. How do we do this quickly . Redo. Four months to i went to this place in the u. K. Alled pangolin works they are the most cutting edge foundry in europe. Photogrammetry machine. You put the models on the inside, pose them, and now from print that is a threedimensional image. This is the same moment, historic lee, as we had when photography was invented, except now it is threedimensional. This is the depth. I will argue that it is not. This in naples this enables us to make larger projects, but they 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 was invaluable to create things that are really dynamic and human. Is a print on the screen. That is the amount of detail that you can get from the photogrammetry machine. Fabulous, but it is also a temptress. It is deceptive because it does not have a lot to do with structure. Structure is what gives feeling and the sense of humanity. I will rush through these. This is how something is done. It is cut in half and reassembled. That is the top. That is the bottom. A one inch figure. This was a test print. This was eventually what we showed to the commission. This is the final assembly of last year in march. This was cast in resin. Base. Patina with a so, from here, we eventually pass through the commission of fine art. I am grateful for that. I would not want to go through that again. I learned a lot from it. Is an interesting project. I want to jump into the last segment of this. Project a sacred to the where the figures are slightly overscale. They are 66, some of them slightly larger because they are not standing upright. They are crouching. They are bursting at the seams of the frame. They are largerthanlife. When you walk from left to , you, and you look at realize that there is something toy heroic and fundamental these men going into battle and returning. It speaks well of humanity. It speaks of heroism that we are able to rise to the occasion, faced with great odds. Creation of figures like apollo or some of the female figures like aphrodite. Memorial. E actual a photo, from and a distance. When you see it up close, i push you closer images. Quinlike. L manne this is the first print and it new shipped and arrives in jersey, in englewood, where it 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. And you can see here our models. We are working from models. Most people today 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 using my anatomical knowledge to take that, translate that into an art form, and one of the big things i am looking for is how do i subdivide the figure into surfaces and each one of those sections when you go to the butcher and you see the picture of the cow and it is all mapped out. You have all the sections. That is called mapping out. 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 where the father is being held back by the mother, who is an allegory for the United States or america. Here is the father. I put a clamp on his coat and recreated the same sort of tension of his coat being pulled off his body as he pulled forward to join his comrades and in arms. These are the attention to details that will be a narrative for the visitor to understand and tell the story told through artistic merit. Not a book, but a visual. That is rare these days. The book has become more important than the 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. Increasing the tension in the jaw. And i work to structure things out and i work with the anatomy to structure things out. This is one of the models. They are transformed into these characters. This is another model. This is the mother figure in the initial scene. This is the diagramming i talked to you about, the idea of convexity. Conc might be cavities avities in the body but 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 the mannequin. It has no energy in it. But it is a fantastic armature to put the clay on and begin the artistic process at scale. We went to a tailor and recreated the costumes that were used in that day and age. And then we applied clay with our hands. And we diagrammed and we created rhythms and movements that are a translation 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 foam and clay from an afternoon of chopping. Where it is cut off and 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 once taught and has now been eliminated in art school. Because for the most part, figurative art is being regulated to a three hour block in an art students career. You see the dynamic action . Nothing is stilled. 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. It gives you an idea of an alteration. The way that the cast old is. Cast bulges. The way that the achilles heel is tensed. The glutes and their tightness. And then the quads and the sense of a rib cage. In the terrace major coming into the deltoid and how how the arm flows out from the back. That is what we are looking at. This is me 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. You can see the fullness and the energy that is there, that is what washington needs from my viewpoint. A sense of dignity because art is a 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 represents 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 that is necessary to survive and 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. And then, we do not wear ,utties when we went into war we wore gaters. The attention to detail is beginning to come out at the scale. The cartridge belts as well have to be developed. They are full. They 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 acts as my object manager on all the logistics involved in these projects. Huge. Both of us work nonstop. Nonstop during the week. 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 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 gives you a sense of scale. It is on the ground here but 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. It does the trick. It is not the tools, it is what is in your head and heart and education. And how, 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 also my wife are standing by also my wife are standing by me. [applause] how did you [indiscernible] sabin 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. Yes, you can put the enemy in, but then the story becomes more complicated. [inaudible] sabin it was pretty quick in the beginning. It is a question. Sabin yeah. I wanted to make something easily understood by all. And then you have many lawyers, too layers, too. I thought putting the enemy and would cause confusion. Any other questions . Thank you very much. Might be a silly question, but where does all the money come from . Sabin 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 apologize. I absolutely the location is perfect right by the white house, the treasury, the commerce department, can you talk about maybe any restoration of the park of Pershing Park . Because right now, 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. As i say, we are required under the preservation act to preserve the existing park. Ofch was deemed Historic American Landscape architecture. 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. So 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 replacing mechanical and plumbing systems, that is paid for by the park service. The second half is the maintenance. Under the commemorative works act which governs memorials in washington, d. C. , 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. You know, a pump brakes. 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 30 years, my day job is with this commission which built Pershing Park in the first place. We built the world war ii memorial. We built the korean war memorial. And we maintain all the memorial cemeteries overseas. To be frank, 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 y 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 that we are putting into it. A handful of very competent world war i sculptors like mckenzie, a canadian that worked in britain, and the sculptor who did the world war ii Memorial World War i memorial sculpture in kansas city. But also did interior sculpture. Your work, frankly, is so much more ambitious than any of those projects. But did you use those in your memory bank as inspiration, as touchstones for your work . Sabin thank you for that question. And 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. They were reminiscent of the cube system that michelangelo used for a rib cage to give it a heavyset structural vitality that would last through many many ages. Its power. It is also a sense of a static energy that is breathing and living. The other element that was important from that piece that i was intrigued by, how the texture was not smoothed over like a lot of what we are seeing today in modern times. But it was applied and had a lot more emotion and 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. So that was the artist i looked one at carefully. Just a caveat for edwin i just restored the first figurative fountain in america. Which has been in storage for 70 years. Admittedly on view in the philadelphia museum, but it is effectively in storage. To my mind most vulnerable part of monuments like this other like this are the water features. Unlike fountains, which are roman 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. Edwin having seen the construction drawings, the water system is not as simple as we would like. One parameter we did originally the competition brief is 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 sits on a freestanding wall that is within the pool. So its complicated. Well aware of that. Hence the commitment to maintenance. I would be remiss if i did not give an update on the status of the project, particularly because my fundraiser is sitting in the back. A 45 Million Dollar project. We have raised 35 million. We will get there. It is a question of when. We are 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. The platform of the sculpture will be there and we will put up temporary imagery like the scaffolding you see. Sabin says he will take five years to finish this. It is why tracy tells me he will take three and a half. Bobby . [inaudible] edwin yes, we have. We have spent a lot of time on lighting design. That is one area that the commission of fine arts really drilled into. The lighting is going to be spectacular. Electric. We did a lighting test. Its fantastic because usually, sculptor sculptures live or die 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 more dramatic and that is the money shot that will be shown when the memorial is done. It is really strong. One final question. Us about thell process about getting the historical details right . I know you had a lot of help from military historians. Sabin so, as you know, commissioner, sabin has worked closely with the commission throughout the process. Deputy secretary, chief historian, as well as commissioner lilia colin who was on the world war i commission all bring expertise to american material culture at that age. Several months ago, sabin came into our office. We went through the entire storyboard of the piece, picked out 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 june, weust may or 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, they dont go around with a full rack of shelves with the in it. 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. But there are legions of nitpickers out there. We want to be faithful to the troops as they were. We are putting a lot of attention to that. We also used original uniforms that saw combat. In fact, i found pictures in the Salvation Army uniform that i got from 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. Rather than a fabric that is different. Please join me in thanking sabin for a wonderful presentation. It is a strong term, but i think m

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