THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 10, 1996 TAG: 9607100059
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOHN W. MALONEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 248 lines
THE AIR CONDITIONER in Paul DiPasquale's Dodge van mutters vainly. The choice is to roll down the windows and shout during this mobile interview or endure the the heat.
The driver - who has made this trip from the city to a mountain foundry many times in recent months - knows a lot about taking heat.
In the long, strange trip of the journey of the Arthur Ashe statue - from the artist's mind to plaster and bronze, from the Waynesboro workshop to Richmond's venerable Monument Avenue - DiPasquale has never lost his cool. Not in public anyway.
The windows stay up. The subject is public art, through the mind of this very public artist. With the unveiling of his ultimate enterprise - bronzes of Arthur Ashe and four children reaching toward him - DiPasquale, 45, is now the best-known artist in Richmond, with the world media headed this way.
The Ashe statue, which will be dedicated today, started like any project, with an inspiration.
``Our responsibility as artists is to investigate an idea. Ninety percent of my investigations are private, but the 10 percent that become public get seen,'' he says.
After the art is made, he continues, comes the often controversial step that separates him from some other artists: marketing the piece. Somebody has to buy the art, he says. Arthur Ashe in many ways was the ultimate sales job.
``If you're going to be a professional artist, guess what? You've got to sell it. If not, you're a professional waiter, a professional sheetrock hanger who does art on the side. . . .
``What people learn in art school is not what it's about. Selling through galleries - it can be done but it's never served me as a professional.''
Art is a process of transforming things, according to DiPasquale. The Ashe that stands on Monument is literal. Ashe approved of the concept - children around a figure who is teaching with books and a tennis racquet. In that approval - in the last stage of his life - Ashe himself was making his final statement, whether he knew it or not, to the hometown he fled.
Had the critics prevailed with an open statue competition, Richmond - and not Ashe - would have dictated the monument's message. Would he be the tennis champ or the political activist? Would he be shown in his usual sweat suit or in a business suit? Which Ashe would it have been?
The question was never fully answered because DiPasquale, in all his entrepreneurial savvy, made his Ashe. The artist wears the real Ashe's general approval like body armor on a dangerous street.
Now, in the striking context of Confederates Lee, Jackson, Davis, Stuart and Maury, stands a new hero - Arthur Ashe in all of his social, racial and intellectual complexity.
Had he not come forward with his statue, had certain key citizens like former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and the fund-raising organization Virginia Heroes not endorsed Monument Avenue as its site, and had Richmond City Manager Robert Bobb not decided to bring the site east on Monument from the near West End, the artist says ``they would have talked about the next monument for 20 years.''
The loudest critics of the statue as art have been art writers, educators and art gallery owners. Their distaste for his monument project, DiPasquale says, is partially rooted in their inability to control it.
Conversely, the critics have lamented DiPasquale's selfish control of the opportunity to honor Ashe. This one-time opportunity should be a shared responsibility, they say.
This week, and in the weeks that follow, people in cars, tour buses and on the sidewalks, will be the ultimate jury. No one has yet seen the piece fully assembled in bronze on the granite base. Those who have evaluated it from photographs have been harsh.
``What hurt initially was that I was believing what they were saying, then I realized people had all kinds of reasons to be critical,'' he says. ``Sorting it all out wasn't my job. My job was the art.''
Having his life's greatest work compared to a man being held up at gunpoint translated in DiPasquale's mind into ``education by criticism.'' He found this extremely healthy and made changes to the statue.
DiPasquale moved on, the critics readjusted their sights.
He was the wrong artist.
It's the wrong site.
It's the wrong art.
The process was too fast.
Those complaints don't matter to DiPasquale. If they don't like it now - and there is a sizable ``they'' here - their opinions may change, he says.
``People's response to any art form is one that evolves. My response to my own work changes over time,'' he says.
DiPasquale eventually gained approval from the Commission for Architectural Review, the Planning Commission and City Council - which voted before a packed house and a citywide TV broadcast.
The passionate community conversation about racism and the site and what people thought was wrong with the statue's design is expected to continue now that the statue is up.
Life's challenges, he says philosophically, can have three outcomes: ``productive,'' ``maintenance'' and ``destructive.''
Guess how he sees himself, then place his critics in the other two categories.
The top floor of the Waynesboro foundry where the statue came together is so big that a hi-fi system's music is simply swallowed by the noisy space, lyrics and melodies slurred into atmosphere. Bronze-burnishing tools scream in three workers' hands, each concentrating on a body part that is meant to last forever. Industrial fans blow the hot air around in wind bursts.
In this busy corner of the top floor, there is the heat of creation. ``Days of Grace,'' Ashe's memoir written while he was dying, rests on a bench with the early castings for the eyeglasses the statue wears.
Pictures marked with paper slips show snapshots of Ashe's extraordinary life, from the smiling child in Richmond around 1945, through UCLA in the '60s, Davis Cup captaining in 1984. There are pictures with John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, Doug Wilder, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Andrew Young and Nelson Mandela. There is also 1993 shot in a hospital hallway, where the frail Ashe sat in a wheelchair with his things in a Woolworth bag between his legs.
From these references, DiPasquale gleaned the hands, the ears and the eyes of his final draft. His Ashe is a composite: The champion's muscularity is intact but the eyes and face come from later years, between the last heart operation and the man's tragic decline from AIDS.
DiPasquale met Ashe only once, at a tennis clinic for children. That scene inspired the statue being unveiled this week.
We are all artists,'' he says. ``We just give it up and other things take over.'' Children investigate their creative urges in amazing ways, says this artist. His start in sculpture: life-size figures he formed as a boy in the mud beneath his swing set. Society, for some unexplained reason, weans people away from that urge.
In his case, ``I never got disinterested in art.'' A 1973 graduate of the University of Virginia, with a 1977 MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, DiPasquale was accepted by U.Va. law school but chose to attend the Boston Architectural Center instead. His daughter Kate was 9 months old when her father quit his full-time teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College so he could pursue art as a career.
Teaching in Alexandria ``was a nirvana job,'' with summers off, he says. All he wanted was a year off to make his big Indian.
He spent $10,000 of his own money to create it, requiring two years instead of one and $20,000, not $10,000. To cover the difference in cost, he sold 50 etchings at $200 with the promise that he would refund the buyers' investment when he eventually sold it.
``Connecticut'' was temporarily homeless in Richmond when Signet Bank raised $39,000 to place it at The Diamond - Richmond's minor league baseball stadium.
The resourceful artist gained a reputation for effective marketing, taking his work wherever it would sell. Some in the art community found this commercialism crass.
DiPasquale just rolls with the punches.
He and wife, Kelly Kennedy, a singer and actor, live with Kate, 14, and Mary, 10, in a 19th-century house on Fulton Hill with a menagerie of dogs and cats. An enormous and pregnant Amazon ballerina, formed from a seamless skin of epoxy, stretches in one room while an equally formidable naked guy bathes in a huge wooden bathtub in the upstairs hallway. These are but a few of the many DiPasquale pieces in his home gallery.
All that remains of the Ashe project in DiPasquale's studio is the plaster shell that is destined for a museum soon. A recently completed bust of Mills Godwin acknowledges the powerful legacy of the two-term governor, as well as an obvious ability of the artist to render classical sculpture. Overhead, waiting to be sold, is a row of porcelain fish that are made to look as thought they are swimming through a wall. A swimming dog, made with a similar technique, attaches to the buyer's ceiling. DiPasquale also markets ducks that do the same thing.
These are the commercial novelties by the same artist who just created a $400,000 work for Monument Avenue. They are also ready reminders that this is a professional career in progress - that all of the achievement being celebrated this week isn't Ashe's and Richmond's but the artist's, too. With the biggest fee of his life, something in the $100,000 range, he can finally install some heat in his studio. More investigations await. MEMO: CHRONOLOGY OF THE ASHE MONUMENT
Arthur Robert Ashe Jr.
Born July 10, 1943
Died Feb. 6, 1993
The process leading to the unveiling of the Ashe monument on July 10
took many turns and mixed politics and public discussion about public
art and how and where to best honor Ashe.
1992
Richmond artist Paul DiPasquale takes a carload of children to a
brief Ashe appearance at a tennis clinic in Richmond's Byrd Park.
The image of the former champion's teaching children becomes the
inspiration for the statue.
Ashe later suggests that books be included somehow in a piece that
could stand at a proposed African-American sports hall of fame based on
his 1988 book about black athletes, ``A Hard Road to Glory.''
DiPasquale plans to do a statue. He meets with or has contact with
various city leaders. He will finance the initial work and then seek
private and or corporate funding for the bronze casting and the
installation of the monument.
Feb. 6, 1993
Ashe dies of complications from AIDS, which he contracted through a
blood transfusion.
December 1993
The board of Virginia Heroes Inc. votes to raise money for the
statue.
The non-profit Virginia Heroes organization was founded in 1990 by
Ashe. It brings successful Virginians to public schools to share
messages of stay in school and avoid drugs and violence.
December 1994
L. Douglas Wilder, a friend of Ashe's and the first elected black
governor in the nation, urges sending ``a transcending message'' by
placing the DiPasquale statue on Monument Avenue.
June 1995
Richmond's Planning Commission approves Monument Avenue as the site.
Statue-backers from Virginia Heroes Inc. say that limiting public
debate was part of their strategy in expediting the political process of
gaining city approval.
Critics, shocked at the sudden reality of DiPasquale's initiative,
compare the statue to a person being held up, a cactus or someone
holding a ``Will work for food'' sign.
July 1995
About 100 people speak at a public hearing held by the City Council,
which approves the Monument Avenue location.
Also, a critical group, Citizens for Excellence in Public Art - led
by a prominent Richmond art gallery owner - circulates a petition to
block the monument and hold an international competition for a
higher-quality statue.
August 1995
Despite continuing protests and community discussion about the
statue, ground is broken on Monument Avenue.
December 1995
The Commission of Architectural Review approves the statue, with
slight modifications to the arms and the angle of the head. Poet Maya
Angelou is mentioned as a possible author of an inscription.
January 1996
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe writes in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that
her late husband authorized a statue for a sports hall of fame, not for
Monument Avenue, especially not in a sweatsuit in DiPasquale's chosen
pose.
She also says she opposes the Monument Avenue site, unlike other Ashe
family members.
March 1996
The Planning Commission recommends to the City Council a proposal by
Citizens for Excellence in Public Art to raise $1 million and hold an
international statue competition for a permanent Monument Avenue statue
to Ashe and other black heroes. It also approves DiPasquale's statue,
which would move to the African-American sports hall of fame, when
constructed.
The City Council subsequently derails Citizens for Excellence in
Public Art, dismissing it as a nearly all-white group that is
non-inclusive to blacks. The council also approves a plan to move
DiPasquale's statue to the sports hall, though many, including Wilder,
doubt it will ever be built.
July 10
The Ashe monument is scheduled to be unveiled.
At press time, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe had declined an invitation to
attend, but she has on other occasions regretted an invitation and later
had a change in schedule to allow attendance. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by BILL TIERNAN, The Virginian-Pilot
DiPasquale puts finishing touches on his sculpture of tennis great
Arthur Ashe on Richmond's venerable Monument Avenue.
LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
The statue honoring Arthur Ashe is in place and awaiting unveiling
today in Richmond.
AP FILE PHOTO
Arthur Ashe holds aloft the trophy after winning the 1975 Wimbledon
championship. by CNB