With beautiful technical execution, UB's Casting Institute poured the fifth of eleven bronze sculptures as part of the Rumsey Restoration Project in the foundry at the Center for the Arts last Friday.
The Rumsey Restoration Project is a $350,000 commission that the Casting Institute has been working on for the past eight years involving the restoration of several sculptures that will be displayed at Alumni Arena upon completion.
Members of the Casting Institute are particularly excited to be working on this project, as it is the first large-scale commission executed in the foundry.
"It's the first realization of that investment in terms of giving back to the community," said Julie Silver, president of the Casting Institute.
A foundry is the place where artists cast bronze or other metals into sculptures by melting the metal at temperatures of approximately 2,000 degrees and then pouring it into a mold for a sculpture. Friday, eight members of the Casting Institute executed this process cleanly and efficiently.
In a scene that seemed choreographed, leather-clad team members worked together to extract 1,250 pounds of fiery hot bronze from two furnaces as the bronze spit long green flames into the air. The metal was poured into a two-part mold made of chemically compressed sand beneath which lay the relief for a sculpture that is nearly 75-years-old.
The Rumsey project dates back to 1928, when Charles Renee Rumsey, a local sculptor, created 11 concrete reliefs that were attached to a building in New York City in honor of the 1928 Olympics. When the building was demolished in 1954, the reliefs were sent to the Clark Gym at South campus to be stored.
According to Silver, the pieces had been vandalized by students and severely damaged after several years. The Rumsey family and several other donors then commissioned UB to restore these works and hang them in the corridor between the CFA and Alumni Arena.
When the project is finished, the Casting Institute will have successfully taken Rumsey's nearly ruined art and transformed it into "material that is basically eternal," said Dave Derner, technical director of the project.
The participants in the project agreed that the process has been a long one that has been full of painstaking work for the Casting Institute, which is composed of several faculty members, graduate students and a handful of undergraduate students.
According to Derner, UB's foundry facility is one of the largest of its kind at a university setting in the country. The foundry is capable of pouring up to 1,600 pounds of molten metal, while most other universities' facilities are only capable of pouring approximately 500 pounds.
Few college campuses have access to a foundry and when the CFA was built in 1993, it was equipped with a state of the art foundry with the capabilities to use copper and tin in the process of melting bronze so that it can be produced at a less expensive cost.
Several of the faculty members in the sculpture department pointed to the foundry one of the attractions UB holds for them.
"I came here specifically for the facilities," said Cody Kroll, a graduate student working on the Rumsey Restoration Project.
In addition to the Rumsey project, the Casting Institute was recently commissioned to pour the Buffalo Civil War Memorial, which was the second largest bronze pour to be performed in a university setting in history.
The Casting Institute continues to pour a Rumsey sculpture every five weeks and grants an open invitation for any member of the community to watch, learn and enjoy the process of bronze casting.
