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SPOTLIGHT
ON THE ARTS - July 2002 by Deanna Mascle A Monumental Destiny
His first major piece was a life-size statue of Booker T. Washington, now found at Hampton University in Virginia. That booking led to the Joe Louis Memorial. His career has also encompassed such major commissions as the “Amistad Memorial,” a life size bust honoring former civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and the “Spirit of Freedom,” a memorial for black soldiers of the Civil War. Born in Cincinnati, the 55-year-old Hamilton was raised in Louisville and graduated from the Louisville School of Art in 1969. He later taught sculpting and ceramics at Iroquois High School. Hamilton credits his parents for both his creativity and work ethic. His father was a tailor and his mother a barber. Their business, Your Valet Shop, was located in the heart of the black Louisville business district at 6th and Walnut streets. “It was within this environment that the seeds of my creative energy surfaced.” He continued his art education by attending the University of Louisville and Spalding University. “After art school it was a matter of surviving to feed a family and trying to figure out how to make a living as a practicing artist. The turning point for me was the meeting of the late sculptor, Barney Bright, who opened his studio door to me. I became his assistant and worked with him in the early ’70s. It was here that I knew I could really make a living by doing sculpture.” By 1978, he was able to establish his own studio, but it was the commissions for the Booker T. Washington statue and Joe Louis memorial that served as pivotal breakthroughs for his career. Hamilton treats his work as a job as much as a calling. “Raised in a working class family, I could not help but be structured to go to work every day, although I put more time in the studio in the early part of my career. Now instead of working around the clock, I do a 9 to 5.” Hamilton first gained national public attention with the Booker T. Washington Memorial in 1984, and the Joe Louis Memorial in 1986. His two most recent works, the Amistad Memorial, in New Haven, Connecticut, and Spirit of Freedom: African-American Civil War Memorial in Washington D.C., have established Hamilton as one of the outstanding black sculptors in America. He is best known for his monuments, which not only represent the heroic struggle against slavery, but also celebrate African-American pride. “The high point for me had to be the Washington DC. commission, the African American Civil War Memorial, called the Spirit of Freedom. The unveiling of this piece has eclipsed all other unveiling to date. It has affected the lives of my people all over the nation, and I think that’s what good public art should do. It has given people an education about our role in the Civil War, and it put a face to the heroes that were left out of the history books, and it brought attention to the family that was so important to the war effort as it related to the soldiers that fought for freedom.” One of Hamilton’s current projects includes a statue, commissioned by the city of Louisville, of York, the little-known slave who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition. He is also a finalist for the commission to create the Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese Memorial for the front of KeySpan Park at Coney Island in Brooklyn, NY. In addition, the Speed Museum in Louisville is showing a selection of his work. Accompanying the Ed Hamilton: From the Other Side exhibition is a small display, in the sculpture court, relating to Hamilton’s monument works. While he welcomes the success and recognition his major monument work has brought, it has not come without cost. “The major public commissions have pretty much stopped my flow of my own inner creative spirit, I look forward to being able to get back to a time when I can just do my own studio works that are not committed to a particular project or an event.” Faith in God, a loving family and the knowledge of his purpose in life have kept Hamilton working through good times and bad. “Life has been good and if I had it to do all over again, I would not change a thing. This is my destiny.” Throughout his career, Hamilton has centered his practice upon the question of identity, creating work that, while reflecting his training in the traditions of European and American art, is tempered by a sense of his own African-American roots. In the 1970s and 1980s this interest manifested itself in symbolic form. Utilizing assemblage techniques, Hamilton focused the attention of his viewer’s attention on issues of injustice, exclusion, and historical amnesia. “I want to provoke people to
think and wonder about how this sculpture was done; a memory about something
that he or she has experienced in their life. Public sculpture can heal,
provoke, make one think, can be sacred space, public space. And above
all it needs to be good, and fit the space that it will occupy.”
Deanna Mascle is a
staff writer for The Lane Report. |
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Booker
T. Washington, Joe Louis, Medgar Evars, and Amistad…the list sounds
like a Who’s Who of American Black History, but it is actually
just a sampling of the monuments and statues that Louisville sculptor
Ed Hamilton has created during his three-decade career.