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Alan LeQuire
Alan LeQuire is one of the nation’s premiere sculptors. His works adorn the walls of institutions like Vanderbilt University, and the Country Music Hall of Fame, as well as private collections around the world. His monumental works, Musica, the largest bronze figure group in the United States, and Athena Parthenos, the largest indoor statue in the western world, enrich the visual landscape of Nashville.
CULTURAL HEROES
exhibit at
THE CLINTON CENTER
Spring 2019
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After graduating from Vanderbilt University, LeQuire spent a year of apprenticeship to Milton Hebald, an American sculptor living in Italy and afterward studied figurative sculpture with Peter Agostini in the MFA program of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. LeQuire had grown up in a rural area outside of Nashville and the time spent with Hebald in the Roman campagna reinforced his instinctive sense of a pastoral theme in his art.
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“Alan is an amazing artist, known both nationally and internationally. His public works in Nashville have become cultural landmarks for our great city, and we are very lucky to have an artist of his caliber.” |
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Hebald introduced him to master craftsmen who practiced techniques of bronze casting dating back to classical antiquity. Particularly from the example of Giacomo Manzù, LeQuire rediscovered the versatile plasticity of clay, a material which, instead of defining and thus limiting its own form, can express any texture or form and transfer it to other media such as bronze. Since then most of LeQuire’s work, from the miniature to the monumental, has first been modeled in wet clay.
These threads of LeQuire’s Italian experience converged in the commission to reconstruct the Athena Parthenos statue for Nashville’s full-scale replica of the Parthenon, which he won soon after completing his North Carolina MFA in 1981. The unveiling of this work in 1990 made LeQuire a celebrated and controversial figure throughout Tennessee and attracted favorable notice from classical scholars, archaeologists and art critics nationwide, with articles in Art News and the New York Times Magazine.
To learn more, visit www.alanlequire.com