Fiberglass and Hayden's Second Dr. King Tribute
In 1968, Frank Hayden began to experiment with fiberglass and added it into his repertoire. With it, he was able to bring his sketches to life even more so than he had with plaster.
“Fiberglass is a hybrid plastic substance, marrying woven glass fibers with liquid polyester resin. First developed in the 1930s by the Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation, the material is made by splitting molten glass into thin filaments and weaving them together to produce textiles. The glass fabric is then dipped in or brushed with liquid polyester resin as reinforcement and cured until rigid.”
“Fiberglass is especially adaptable for artists, as the glass cloth can be placed in a mold and then brush with resin to create solid yet light weight surfaces, akin to to papier-mâché in process. Unlike other plastics that rely exclusively on industrial molding and extruding, fiberglass allows artists to work in the comfort of their own studios”
During World War II, it was used for aircrafts. Then in the 1950s, it began to be used for boats, sports cars, furniture, and things like surfboards.
In the 1960s, artist, like New York based Eva Hesse, popularized latex and fiberglass to be used for sculpture, as she was “experimenting with fluid contours of the organic world of nature.”
There are also traces of it being used by artist in the 1950s. Sculptor, Duane Hanson, who was living in German in the 1950s, discovered the medium with the work of Georg Grygo.
Fiberglass provided Hayden new freedoms and opened him to new directions with his art. He began to explore new forms and bring figures from his drawings to life.
In looking at the 1967 book Sketches in Black and White, which Hayden did with his friend and former German teacher, Mariana Scott, you can see the root of his fiberglass sculptures, as his sculptures are extensions of the ideas and designs that Hayden had been exploring in his drawings.
Sketches in Black and White contains poems by Scott and drawings by Hayden. He had begun doing these drawings in 1960 after returning to the U.S. from studying in Munich. The ugliness of racism and segregation was even more appalling to Hayden, after living abroad for a year. The drawings became an outlet for Hayden to process his anger, and frustration with the weekly horrors on the news and around him.
When he started to create fiberglass sculptures like the sketches, Hayden became even more clever with the design and layout. He refined some of his visual themes, which would be repeated regularly in subsequent works. Each sculpture also presented visual parables, like puzzles, which engaged viewers to find the message. These sculptures, though plastic, looked organic and alive as figures turned into branches or vines and connected with other figures. Hayden also began to play around with the words, experimented with type faces and the layout of the letters.
By 1971, the floodgates had opened and Hayden’s creativity was in overdrive. He soon had a large body of exotic new works. Many were quite large and their impact was striking.
Hayden had a showing of some of these new pieces in April of 1971, then in June, he loaded a truck and brought a bunch up to Chicago. This was not Hayden’s first trip to Chicago. That was in 1953, when he lived there for a summer. A few years later, in 1956, Hayden created the Stations of the Cross for St. John Fisher Church in West Chicago. The following year, he created a number of relief sculptures for the St. John Vianny School. Then in 1968, his friend John Bartolomeo, an architect, commissioned Hayden to produce sculptures and reliefs for a new church being built in the suburbs of Chicago.
Hayden worked on this 1968 commission when he was studying abroad in Stockholm. While there, Dr. King was assassinated in his childhood hometown of Memphis. When Hayden spoke to Black World Magazine, he spoke about how “At the time of his death, I was with my family studying in the safe port of Stockholm Sweden. I still cannot describe to myself the horror and despair which we experience when this happened. We felt completely cut off, alone and threatened.”
Dr. King was only a few years older than Hayden and had meant so much to so many. To loose him like this hit hard. When Hayden returned to the U.S., he began to explore creating his own monument to Dr. King. The first one being the piece found in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Catholic Student Center at Southern University.
But this was not the last monument that Hayden was inspired to make on Dr. King. The first one was poetic and abstract and some people had hoped for something with Dr. King’s likeness.
As Hayden reflected on this, a new Dr. King sculpture emerged. This time, it was a large bust in fiberglass.
Busts were nothing new to Hayden. He had a lot of experience with them and even taught students how to make them. Though one at this scale - nearly five feet - was a first for him.
He would premiere it at the South Side Community Arts Center show. In the same Black World Magazine article he spoke on the piece, saying that this was “a personal tribute to a man who symbolized faith among those who doubted Christianity and democracy, hope to those who despaired and love in the mist of hatred.“ Hayden went on to say “Dr. King achieved this symbolic value to the world, I believe, through the union of his words and acts, and when he was murdered, it was a reenactment of the crucifixion in Black.”
The King bust is quite striking and is a perfect likeness of Dr. King. It brings in other elements though, like African facial scarification and Hayden’s signature themes of gothic like figures and reaching hands. The scarification showcases excerpts from Dr. King’s speech that he delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in August 1963.
The show at the South Side Community Arts Center was attended by many of the hippest black artist and figures in Chicago at the time. The Dr. King bust was bought by the pioneering black ad man, Tom Burrell. Many years later, Burrell would donate the bust to the Du Sable Black History Museum and Education Center, a museum started by the artist and historian, Dr. Margaret Burroughs. It is prominently featured in the Museum located in Washington Park next to the University of Chicago.
-Bennet Rhodes
Brought to you by Culture Candy, Baton Rouge
Sources
October 1969. Sunday Advocate
americanart.si.edu/blog/plastic-fantastic-duane-hansons-woman-eating
www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/movies/review-eva-hesse-documentary
Black World. November 1971
All art photos by Bennet Rhodes