Sculpting Our Nation’s Story with America’s Michelangelo
Published: 26 December 2024
By Candice Greaux
via the Philanthropy Roundtable website

Blog-Images-1080-x-1080-2024-12-26T093704.070-1024×1024
World War I was a war the American people didn’t want.
In 2015, the World War I Centennial Commission launched a design competition to support the creation of a National WWI Memorial in our nation’s capital. When artist and Master Sculptor Sabin Howard was selected to craft the monument that would be the focal point of the Memorial, he brought a worldview that through art, we can return to the values system that has driven Western Civilization for over 2,000 years.
“The War to End all Wars” raged in Europe and the Middle East for nearly three years as leadership and public opinion in America embraced a posture of neutrality. Chief among the American people’s concerns was their opposition to sending working-class men and boys to fight a war in faraway lands, captured in the sentiment that “a rich man’s war meant a poor man’s fight.”
A series of German provocations eventually made it impossible for our nation’s leaders to ignore the urgent threat to democracy. After declaring war on Germany, the Selective Service Act was passed to raise a national army through conscription. Millions of young Americans would serve, and over 100,000 would make the ultimate sacrifice in just 18 months.
Capturing the physicality of the common man who served in World War I and conveying the depth of their heroism was no small feat. But for Howard, whose nearly 60-foot-long, 25-ton bronze frieze titled “A Soldier’s Journey” was unveiled just steps from the White House earlier this year, it was the most important story to tell about the war.
“Veterans’ faces are a direct history of what they have passed through,” he remarked when reflecting on the process of bringing this epic work to life.
The focus of his story is the Everyman – who answered the call to serve, toiled and triumphed for the flag and returned home a different version of himself. When you get to know Howard’s mission to bring back traditional sculpting methods and celebrate humanity through a lens of conservative values, it’s no surprise he cast the Everyman as the hero.
The time it took to bring this vision to life was magnitudes greater than the amount of time the U.S. fought in the actual war. To tell this story, Howard worked with dozens of models in torn-from-the-period uniforms, took over 12,000 action photographs of the models and marshaled a team of artists moving massive figures across oceans as they sketched, sculpted and cast this tribute to the Everyman. The final monument, the story, details 38 moments in the soldier’s journey of service.
Parallels abound between the era of World War I and the years that this monument was being created, none quite so disruptive as the grips of global pandemics. In 1918, the Spanish flu had a significant impact on WWI from the battlefield to the high seas and beyond.
Howard received approval on the vision in 2019, and he and his team had only begun putting hand to clay when the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world. It touched every part of their operation, from team scheduling to acquiring the materials they needed from the best foundries in the U.K. They were challenged to embrace a new kind of creativity and camaraderie, even quarantining together while creating the monument.
The expanse of time and overcoming challenges looms large in this story, not just in the pandemic parallels, but in the connections between the models who helped animate “A Soldier’s Journey.”
Read the entire article on the Philanthropy Roundtable website here:
External Web Site Notice: This page contains information directly presented from an external source. The terms and conditions of this page may not be the same as those of this website. Click here to read the full disclaimer notice for external web sites. Thank you.