It looks like a party for supersize time travelers: Abraham Lincoln, eleven feet tall, raises his arm sternly, as if to emphasize a point, while a nine-foot-tall Senator Stephen Douglas, hand on his hip, scowls. At his elbow is a thoughtful ten-foot Dr. W.W. Mayo; at a diminutive eight feet, Mother Alfred Moes, the nun who persuaded him and his sons to staff what would become the Mayo Clinic, looks on serenely. Across the warehouselike space, a ten-foot-plus Native American warrior reclines in a huge nylon sling, waiting for his ride back to Cincinnati.
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The statues of Lincoln and Douglas, for instance, are Chicago-area artist Rebecca Childers Caleel’s representation of the 1858 debates that launched Lincoln to national prominence and killed Douglas’s designs on the White House. They’re headed for Ottawa, Illinois, where the first of the seven debates took place. The statue of Moes is the recent work of Urbana sculptor Mike Major. Moes’s companion, Dr. Mayo, was sculpted by Chicago artist Leonard Crunelle in 1915. After nearly a century weathering the elements–and pigeons–of Rochester, Minnesota, the older statue was sent to Art Casting for refurbishing. The two statues will soon stand together on the grounds of the Mayo Clinic.
Perhaps the most famous bronze the Spells have cast is the 16-foot-tall Michael Jordan statue at the United Center. They also cast the annual trophy for the Iditarod dogsled race–a figure of an Inuit musher holding one of his dogs. They’re presently working on a fountain commissioned by the DuSable Museum of African American History. The work of sculptor Rene Townsend, it will memorialize the 1839 uprising aboard the slave ship Amistad.
So they came up with the wild idea of buying the foundry themselves–even though, aside from a less than successful bust of Julius Caesar that Harry had carved in high school, neither had any relevant experience. Nonetheless, they dived in headfirst. Keeping their house in Peoria, they rented an apartment in Oregon. Karly resigned from the university to run the foundry. Harry continued to teach in Peoria, commuting back and forth three or four times a week. At first they had only one employee, a metalworker inherited from the previous management, and one client, Wisconsin sculptor William Jauquet. Gradually they built up the business, doing everything from the bookkeeping to the actual casting and finishing themselves.
The new bronze is exposed to a combination of acids and other chemicals that give its surface a finished texture and color, called a patina. Different chemical combinations produce different patinas, from deep smooth red to bright green to mottled brown. Some patinas make bronze look like wood or marble. Most patina solutions are no more caustic than orange juice. The Italian old masters used to get brownish patinas by rubbing raw potatoes on the bronze. Other finishes required the use of urine.
