Nation’s Capital Prepares To Celebrate Veterans Of WWI And All Wars With Magnificent Renaissance Memorial
Published: 22 August 2024
via the ABC 27 WHTM television station (PA) website
Howard on platform
Sculptor Sabin Howard oversees on site assembly of A Soldier's Journey.
In 2016, master sculptor Sabin Howard won the international design competition for the National WWI Memorial. He and his teammate architect-in-training Joe Weishaar beat 360 teams from around the world for the great honor of memorializing the Great War, the War to End All Wars, for which 4.8 million Americans mobilized and 116,516 died.
Howard’s background in drawing and sculpting after his great masters Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael led him to design a radically beautiful sculpture: 60’ long and 10’ high, 25 tons of bronze, featuring 38 figures telling the story of A Soldier’s Journey.
These soldiers, nurses, and even children fit together as a sublime and cohesive symphony of art while also being beautiful and whole as single figures: humanity at its finest, interconnected and elevating.
Howard’s human and humane vision of art stands in direct opposition to the alienation, irony, and debasement of the art of the last one hundred years. Ironically, it was World War I itself, with its decimation of Europe, that ushered in the soulless and fragmented art of ugliness and discomfort.
Howard resolved to change the direction of the art world by creating a monument that is in direct lineage to the great ideals of western civilization, ideals that uplift the human spirit and elevate us toward our highest potential.
As Howard shared with beloved podcast host Mike Rowe, “The next wave, the next tsunami is going to hit the beach. And it’s all about beauty and about humanity.”
Each individual can choose heroism in their own story, their own voyage through the travails of the human condition.
A Soldier’s Journey is currently on site in the National WWI Memorial Park, formerly Pershing Park, in front of the Willard Hotel. Howard checks over the assembly and will apply the final patina in the coming days.
National television will cover the Illumination Ceremony at dusk on September 13, 2024. This candle-lit ceremony will also be live-streamed.
Sculptor Sabin Howard is due to appear on CBS Sunday Morning on September 1, 2024.
Read the entire article on the WHTM website here:
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