JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
At 92, sculptor and engineer Ed Dwight has lived multiple lives. In the '60s, he trained to become America's first Black astronaut. But when NASA passed him over, he found his calling in bronze. Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Warner reports.
RYAN WARNER, BYLINE: Ed Dwight celebrates Blackness in America with more than a hundred memorials nationwide of civil rights activists, musicians, athletes and cowboys. But in a new retrospective at the History Colorado museum, he says the piece that means the most to him is Dirt Farmers. It depicts his grandparents who farmed in Kansas City. His grandfather collected scrap metal.
ED DWIGHT: Being on the farm, he had a wagon and a horse and a mule, and we would drive all through the city picking up junk. And I would jump off the wagon when he saw a piece of junk. Well, that's how I started my art career - it was doing junk.
WARNER: Abstract pieces, but a mentor encouraged him to switch to likenesses, which meant learning about historical figures Dwight wasn't exposed to in school.
DWIGHT: I didn't know who Harriet Tubman was until I was 42 years old, and Frederick Douglass. I never knew they existed.
WARNER: Dwight says there's an intimate relationship between artist and subject.
DWIGHT: I cannot do a sculpture of anybody unless I become them. I study pictures of them from every angle - actually transform myself into whoever I'm sculpting. And if I'm satisfied with how I feel, where I feel physically and spiritually and emotionally, then I'll stop and move to the next one.
WARNER: Dwight remembers sculpting baseball legend Hank Aaron, who'd flown in to see the progress.
DWIGHT: His face had fallen off on the floor 'cause it got so hot that the clay melted, and his ass dropped down. That guy had a big ass in the beginning - really interesting guy.
WARNER: Dwight fixed it, and he says the two became close friends. Today, illness and vision loss mean Dwight no longer sculpts, but he hopes to write books about his artistic adventures, like the time he says the Mafia approached him, hoping to use his foundry for forgeries. Dwight says he declined. The show "Casting A Legacy" runs through early next year at History Colorado Center.
For NPR News, I'm Ryan Warner in Denver.
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