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Creator of Wells sculpture acknowledges project's challenges
Oct. 16, 2000
NOTE TO EDITORS: Photographs and more information about the Wells sculpture are available on a special Web site at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/OCM/wells.htm. Digital images suitable for publication also are available at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/OCM/wellsphotos/index.html. For more information, contact the IU Office of Communications and Marketing at 812-855-3911.
BLOOMINGTON -- Anticipation is high regarding Saturday's dedication of a new sculpture of the late Indiana University chancellor Herman B Wells. Few in Bloomington have seen the bronze representation now being kept under heavy security in a university warehouse. Most will see it for the first time at the dedication ceremony.
The sculpture and the plaza in which it rests will be dedicated in a public ceremony on Saturday (Oct. 21) at 9 a.m. It will be located in the Old Crescent area of campus near the Rose Well House. Everyone is invited to attend, although seating will be limited. The event is expected to last 30 minutes, and it will take place rain or shine. No tickets are needed.
The sculptor, IU South Bend Professor Tuck Langland, remembers the reaction of most workers in a New York foundry where sculptures are cast every day.
"When we were finishing the piece up in the foundry in New York, everybody that walked through that area and looked at him would smile," Langland said. "He made people smile just sitting there, people who had never met him, never knew who he was -- and these were people who work in a foundry that does hundreds of bronze sculptures a month."
Langland met Wells only once and for only a brief time about six months before his death. The sculptor worked from many photographs and consulted with committee members.
"The committee that organized this was pretty clear about what they wanted. They wanted it to be characteristic of how he was. They wanted him smiling," he said. The committee told him they wanted to see a Wells from his late 60s to early 70s, and before the aging process affected his quality of life.
"The whole idea is this: it's in between classes and it's a nice, perhaps spring, day, and it's blustery. He's walked out of his office. He has sat down to say hello to students who are walking around," Langland said. "He's got his hand extended to shake your hand. Did you know that he always kept his hand flat when he shook hands? His palm was facing down, but he didn't put his hand out vertically the way most people do.
"He's got a pleasant look on his face."
Wells, who passed away March 18 at the age of 97, served as IU's acting president in 1937-38, as IU president between 1938 and 1962, and as interim president for three months in 1968. Since 1962, Wells served as the university's chancellor.
The late chancellor is not the only person Langland has sculptured who has affected people's lives. He also captured in bronze another "interesting character," Ed Lowe, a clay salesman from Cassopolis, Mich., who is credited with giving the world kitty litter. He also memorialized a longtime, beloved community leader in South Bend, Ind., Charles Martin, who worked with a number of youth organizations.
"These portraits are usually asked for by someone else," Langland said, noting that Wells questioned him about why anyone would do a statue of him. "He is probably the most famous, widely recognized person of all of the people I've done, and he would probably be the last person to say, 'go ahead and make a big statue of me.'"
Langland said he didn't feel any additional pressure about getting Wells portrayed just right. "You've got exactly the same problem no matter who you're doing, and that is to make it look like them," he said.
"That's the same situation, particularly when you've got a lot of photographs from different eras in his life and he's smiling here, he's squinting there and he's turning his head there. It gets to be a real trick to extract somebody out of that. It's really the same problem no matter who it is you're doing.
"There is one other thing: it somehow has to be good sculpture. In other words, it has to have good form, structure and composition."
Langland strongly believes that his representation of Wells is good sculpture, and he hopes that others who gather at the dedication ceremony and beyond will agree.
(George Vlahakis, 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)