Transcription
Good morning. I'm here to reset your hard drive. It's 4:00 on a Thursday, October 22nd, and I'd started work on a Monday in a South Philly woodworking shop. All day I'd been picking up scraps of wood and chucking them in a 50-gallon oil drum, and I just couldn't take it anymore. I walked over to my boss, and I said, "I quit." And he said, "You can't quit." So, I said, "F you." And I walked out that door.
On the street, I called my dad collect from a payphone. I said, "Dad, I want to go to art school." His response was, "How long is this going to last?" I hung up on him. The next call was to the Philadelphia College of Art, and I asked to speak to admissions. I stated my purpose. I wanted to go to art school, and the woman on the other end asked me, "Do you have a portfolio?" What's a portfolio? She told me to come on over, and we could talk about it, and she recommended I buy a book. It The book was called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
I got that book and went home, and I started the first exercises. Now, bear in mind, I couldn't even draw. I'd never done it before, and it took all my effort and all my focus. It was like learning how to walk. It's a transformational moment. I had been called. After 90 days, I went back. I had 90 drawings, and that same lady pulled 10 drawings out of that stack, and she said, "You're going to get in." I was shocked. "How do you know?" "Because I'm the head of admissions."
That fall, I started art school. I'd ended up at the best figurative art school in the country. I was taught the value of Western civilization. Beauty, excellence, the truth of the creator in whose image we are made. And it was a path to being on my best version. Everywhere I went, I carried books with pictures of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Renaissance art brought me back to being human, making, building, and creating. And I was reminded that man is made in the image of God, and I'd come home to a deep connection born out of my childhood in Italy. Every day with my grandfather, we had walked through the porticos, the piazzas, and the cathedrals. And now when I looked at Michelangelo's Pietà, or the Laocoön, the reaction was visceral. This was not some old archaeological stuff. No, these artists set the standards, and this this was my instruction manual. My reference, the figure.
I was taught how to look at nature, translate the life model into art using the visual grammar of anatomy, proportions, and disegno to organize millions of bits of information into one unified whole. This was the great artistic canon animated by conviction that reality is intelligible, that light signifies truth, and beauty discloses order. And the premise? What is the premise? That humans are spiritual humans, spiritual beings. Yes, and art is the representation of human spiritual consciousness. There are rules to the game, and those rules carried objective truths, standards of excellence from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance. It was an understanding of the movement dictated by how the skeleton shifted under weight and force. It wasn't about our egos or our feelings. It was about objective sacred truths, the laws of nature, our visual North Star. It was about the reality first told in Genesis. God saw all that he made, and it was very good. The standards aided us in deducing what we saw in the model under a light in a dark room. And there was a clarity between the shadows and the light. That that was not about what they made in the contemporary art world. That that I'm speaking about is a destruction corruption of where we stand in relation to God. Yes, our individual experience is important, and perception brought uniqueness to the game, but the game needed to be universal and significant in meaning. The ultimate purpose of visual narrative in service of the values of Western civilization.
And now here's the sad truth. What I learned in the '80s in art school has been eliminated. Led by an art world whose standards are about shocking and never been done before. The knowledge and aesthetics of Western civilization have been deemed irrelevant. I was in a spiritual war against being human and honoring God. Nothing absolutely nothing had any meaning. And the idea that we could replace God with ego and chaos led to some heated arguments with some of those teachers. I fought back. Get the hierarchy right. The ultimate creator is God, and I did not invent the universe. I am made in his image. My creative abilities stem from that godly source. Their response? God is dead.
As a young sculptor, I anchored my vision with the teachers that taught me how to build a figure in line with a with a Renaissance. And it's a heroic way to perceive reality and translate that into art. This priceless definition of humans became my stewardship to play it forward. And for the next 35 years, I practiced my craft. Sculpting from models hidden away in dark studios in East Harlem and the South Bronx with a single light source, just like Leonardo had recommended. The status quo That's right. The status quo held in place by critics, academics, galleries, and museums shunned this traditional. They no no longer aligned with the sacred principles of art. And this was a wall guarded by ignorant and arrogant Pharisees full of ego with no room for the truth, goodness, or beauty. But general public gets it. Just look at the lines at the Vatican.
In 2015, the next chapter opened and I entered into a global competition for the National World War I Memorial. I beat out 360 design teams and for 4 and 1/2 years I fought against the Washington D.C. bureaucracy for project approval. Exhausted and cynical, we finally passed through the gate and I won the right to sculpt the National World War I Memorial. The result is a soldier's journey, 60-ft long bronze wall, 38 figures. And that moment, yes, it presents that moment in history when 22 million people were decimated and the world asked, "Is God dead?" At the heart of that sculpture stands the shell-shocked figure. He is that definitive moment. Frozen in space, face twisted in turmoil, the shell-shocked soldier stands alone. And alone he confronts you.
Each figure took an average 650 hours to sculpt and a lot of those models were combat veterans. Their souls permeate that bronze wall. The shell-shocked soldier was sculpted from one Marine, Ricky Zambrano. Served 7 years and 7 months in combat duty in Afghanistan. And less than an hour after his plane hit the U.S. soil, one of his brothers shot himself in the head and shortly after Zambrano spiraled. Balloons to 300 lb and all the VA gave him were more pills, and they numbed him. And one night he took all those pills at once, but something says something made him rise up and he stumbled to the bathroom and made himself throw up. And at that moment he realized that no one was coming to save him. What was in him was more than enough. And that moment was his connection with his maker. That moment redefined who Ricky was. Ricky chose life and Ricky chose God. And in the monument this tragic protagonist is Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche's modern man. The shell-shocked soldier is symbolic of the destruction of Western civilization. Look at his face. It's in agony, and look at his body, it's stuck. That is what happens when you say God is dead. What we make and who we are is inextricably connected to our rich history. And if you destroy that history and the idea of God, you destroy a part of each and every one of us. You destroy our moorings and our grounding.
My response was radical. Make a bronze memorial empowering agency and play the play forward the truth and light of Christ. Make it so people get it now. Make it visceral. Make a three-dimensional drawing on steroids exploding out of the darkness. So I made a bronze movie playing forward those values that we should deem sacred. And I will not stand down. The fabric of our history has been frayed and ripped apart. And it is time, yes, time now to stand. Stand in this civilizational moment, for God never went away, just some of us closed our eyes. Art represents who we are, and I refuse to be represented by a cold pile of bricks on a cement gallery floor. Thank you. We must create and create a contemporary vision of rising towards higher consciousness. We are the stewards of that future.
Now, this project took 10 years, and what followed is an act of faith. On March 11th, 2025, my wife and I packed up all our earthly belongings and got into a Sprinter van and headed west towards Salt Lake City. With no governing body, no commission, just the knowing that we had to proceed. I had a calling to build America's largest figurative monument, the Grand Liberty Arch. Now, you can talk you can talk all you want, but ultimately ideas need to be built. And it is time to build. Build a monument to celebrate with pride the history of the United States to honor the 250th birthday. My mission, create an arch to lead us through a portal to a new paradigm. So, with 56 monumental figures all intertwined. A total width of 60 ft and a height of 36, this arch is an epic symbol that redefines our freedom today. And look at those words, In God We Trust. The arch is explosive, uncontainable, and it breaks past all the boundaries of the architecture. That's us, the protagonist is you, the everyman, pushing and pulling towards the future on the hero's journey, led by a powerful reoccurring symbol symbol of liberty. So, if we see human beings as meaningless, we will build systems that treat them as worthless. But if we see human beings as made in the image of God, we will build monuments and nations that reflect their sacred worth. For bronze will weather and stone will age, and generations will pass beneath those structures we create. But, and it's a big one, if we remain faithful to our calling and faithful to the dignity of our being, faithful to the truth that grounds free will, then what endures will not simply be a monument. What endures will be a people who remember who they are. A people who rise to be their best version. Thank you. >> Woo!