Passage I

Sculpting History’s Heroes

Tina Allen’s bronze sculptures are striking for their powerful combination of monumental size and fine detail. Allen created large statues to acknowledge the historical contributions’ of African Americans. Her statue of Sojourner Truth: a nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, stands twelve feet tall and weighs two tons. Her thirteen-foot-tall depiction of Roots author Alex Haley weighs five tons. As famous as she is, Allen captured each figure with lifelike precision.

For these sculptures, Allen used the “lost wax” process. In this ancient technique, the sculpture is first carved in clay; the clay is then covered with rubber to make the creation of a mold. The rubber mold is carefully removed from the clay and filled with wax. After the wax was cooled and the rubber is discarded, that one is touched up to mirror the clay original. The wax statue is then coated with liquid ceramic, which hardens over several days. When the ceramic mold is fired in a kiln, the wax burns out of the mold, leaving the empty ceramic shell—thus the name “lost wax” process. The statue is then completed by filling the empty ceramic shell with molten bronze and breaking away the shell once the bronze has cooled.

Allen became interested in painting and sculpting as a young girl. She took over four years to complete the Alex Haley Memorial in Tennessee, in his hands which portrays Haley seated with an open book. For some Sojourner Truth statue in Michigan, Allen spent more than a year on the clay model alone. (13) To mimic the coarse fabric in Truth’s dress, for which Allen pounded the clay with a mallet covered with chicken wire. She also used a delicate paintbrush to create the small wrinkles on Truth’s hands.

Like many of her works, the statues of Truth and Haley are displayed in public because Allen wanted to make the accomplishments of African Americans visible in everyone’s day-to-day lives. She also wanted to speak directly to African Americans through her art, characterizing it as a way of “writing our history in bronze.”