Evelyn Raymond A Sculptor’s Own Storycollections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/56/v56i...3...

Evelyn Raymond A Sculptor’s Own StoryAn oral history, edited and introduced by Thomas O’Sullivan

In February 1997 sculptor EvelynRaymond reflected on her career in aseries of tape-recorded interviews for theMinnesota Historical Society’s oral histo-ry collection. Surrounded by sculpturesin bronze, copper, concrete, and steel inher St. Louis Park home, Raymondrecalled artists and anecdotes from a 70-year time span. The interviews portray aprivate, often solitary person who has alsobeen one of Minnesota’s most publicsculptors: “A bold artist but a shywoman,” as a Minneapolis journalist oncedescribed her.1

Raymond was born in Duluth in 1908of French, Canadian, and Swedish her-itage. She spent her childhood summersin Minnesota’s north woods, where herfather headed road-building crews andher mother managed their camps. Shegrew up admiring the handiwork of herfather and uncles, who built woodenlaunches to race on the St. Croix River.Her grandfather was a builder, whose

left: Evelyn Raymond at work in the WPA’sWalker Art Center, modeling a bas relief offootball players for the International Fallsstadium, 1941.

Thomas O’Sullivan is curator of art at theMinnesota Historical Society.

1 Anne Brataas, “The Bigger the Better:Minnesota Sculptor Still ‘Chipping’ After 45Years,” Minneapolis Star, Jan. 29, 1981,Community/West sec., 4. Unless otherwisecited, all quotations are from Evelyn Raymond,interview by Thomas O’Sullivan, tape record-ings, St. Louis Park, Minn., Feb. 27, 1997,Minnesota Historical Society (MHS). A tran-script of the interview is also available in theMHS library.

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Raymond’s willingness to work in the public eye.She made the full-size clay model before aninterested audience in the lobby of the WalkerArt Center: “If you’ve been a hermit for eightyears, you get pretty shy. And look around andsee all those people staring at you, and thenyou’re doing your first big job, it’s not all easy.”2

Raymond’s public accessibility, teaching, andbig jobs continued for decades after the FAPended in 1943. She taught at the Walker ArtCenter until midcentury. She gave lessons inher home and studio well into her eighties. Avocal advocate for Minnesota artists, Raymondfounded the Minnesota Sculpture Society andparticipated in regional exhibitions includingsolo shows at the Walker Art Center and theMinnesota State Fair. Her commitment tobringing art to the people took ingeniousforms: in 1949 she converted a YWCA tenniscourt into a sculpture garden during the Min-neapolis Aquatennial festival, for example. Herown work continued at a prolific rate through-out the 1950s and ’60s with large-scale commis-sions for churches and corporations. And asMinnesota planned to observe its statehoodcentennial in 1958, Raymond won a major com-mission that was a high point of her career.

In the United States Capitol in Washington,D.C., each state honors two of its citizens inbronze statues. Minnesota’s first statue repre-sented Henry M. Rice, an early senator; the sub-ject chosen for the second was University ofMinnesota educator Maria L. Sanford. Fundedby a state appropriation in 1957, the Sanfordcommission came to Raymond as the result of acompetition for which she sculpted both a por-trait head and a full figure. She spent sixmonths on the job, modeling the full-sized stat-ue in clay on a metal armature. She worked in arented automobile showroom that had suf-ficiently high ceilings for the figure, whichstood twice the height of the five-foot-tallSanford. The statue was cast in bronze and dedi-cated in the Capitol rotunda in 1958. Raymondoffered a few words on her work: “I strove todepict to the best of my ability the intelligenceand beauty in the face of Maria Sanford and togive the figure the strength and vigor she had topossess in order for her to have given so muchto her students and to her community.”3

homes in Duluth stand as a substantial back-drop to family photos. The family providedRaymond with models of self-sufficiency, crafts-manship, and tenacity, elements of a “pioneerspirit” that she found evident in her own work.

A lively art program in the Duluth schools,plus her own passion for reading, confirmedRaymond’s love of art and her desire to becomean artist. In 1928 she entered the MinneapolisSchool of Art (today the Minneapolis College ofArt and Design) on a scholarship. There herteachers introduced her to both traditional andmodern art, though the latter was suspect at theschool. Its director, Edmund Kopietz, warnedher that “modern art wasn’t going to go any-place and I’d be wise not to continue that par-ticular bent,” she recalled.

But Raymond showed her independenceearly—first by making abstract sculpture inschool and then by quitting in protest over fac-ulty appointments in 1930. She and two dozenfellow students left to form the Minneapolis ArtStudents League with her mentor, sculptorCharles S. Wells. Raymond studied and taughtat their upstart academy in downtown Minnea-polis for two years. Her mother’s illness broughtthe young sculptor back to Duluth. Taking overher mother’s job, Raymond cooked for theworkers of a 600-acre dairy farm. She recountedthe episode with surprisingly little bitterness,noting that “I didn’t live in the world I was in,because I was constantly reading stuff.” Her rou-tine of kitchen work and self-instruction lastedfor eight years.

Leaving the dairy farm in the middle of theGreat Depression, Raymond at first found noopportunities in the arts. A call in 1938 fromClement Haupers, a fellow artist who headedthe Works Progress Administration’s Federal ArtProject (WPA/FAP) in the upper Midwest,brought her an invitation to return to the TwinCities and to sculpture. At Haupers’s request,Raymond modeled a machinelike, streamlinedfigure she titled ERG as a demonstration of herskills. She joined the FAP as an artist andteacher and created designs for wall carvings,busts, and monumental architectural sculptures.Her giant bas-relief composition of football play-ers for a WPA stadium in International Falls wastypical of the FAP’s sturdy realism as well as

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2 On the WPA/FAP in Minnesota, see Kenneth Hendrickson Jr., “The WPA Federal Art Projects in Minnesota,1935–1943,” and Thomas O’Sullivan, “A Job and a Movement: The WPA Federal Art Project in Minnesota,” bothin Minnesota History 53 (Spring 1993): 170–83 and 184–95, respectively.

3 Evelyn Raymond, “Sculpture Study of Maria L. Sanford,” in Acceptance of the Statue of Maria L. Sanford Presentedby the State of Minnesota (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1960), 69.



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The Sanford statue drew out Raymond’s bestefforts in conceiving and modeling the figureand in marshaling the skills of plaster casters,bronze founders, and movers. She recalled,“There’s pictures of me that were taken. Thiswas well over half a year’s job, and I look likeI’ve got great huge circles under my eyes. It wasreally a rough time, and I wanted to do the bestI could to honor Maria.” This commission notonly demonstrated Raymond’s obligation to herart but revealed a kinship between artist andsubject.

Like Maria Sanford, Raymond devoted her-self single-mindedly to her life’s work. Two gen-erations of students looked to Raymond forguidance; when Minnesota women artists estab-lished their own collective programs in the1970s, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota,they honored Raymond as a key “foremother.”4

While identifying herself as “strictly a femi-

nist as far as joining women’s organizations,”Raymond expressed ambiguity about the effectof her gender on her career. She recalled beingunable to join a stone-workers’ union that wasclosed to women, yet she felt “I don’t think Iever lost a job because I was a woman.” Shefound her mother’s example relevant to herown career. Girlhood lessons in dressmakingproved useful for the pattern-making skillsRaymond later needed for welded steel sculp-ture. The memory of her mother, “a lovelySwedish lady,” wearing riding skirts and pistolsfor work in the woods was a powerful image fora woman artist. But in her philosophy and herexperience, Raymond resisted gender-based cat-egorizations: “I don’t think men or women havea corner on sensitivity or strength—and all artshould have both.”5

A few months after she recounted her mem-ories for the Minnesota Historical Society’s taperecorder at age 89, Evelyn Raymond attendedthe dedication of a new sculpture just a fewblocks from her home. Celebration of Peace, astainless steel abstraction that evokes the imageof doves wheeling through the sky atop a tallpillar, was built for the city of St. Louis Park’snew recreation and cultural center. Nature itselfunveiled the sculpture when a fierce windstormtore off the draperies before Raymond acceptedthe applause of her neighbors. “I don’t reallyneed the publicity but, hell, I think I’ve con-tributed a lot,” she told a reporter, “and at 89you need to give yourself a little credit.” Ray-mond died on April 25, 1998, a month after herninetieth birthday.6

Most of Raymond’s works present a distinc-tive blend of recognizable subject with stylized,even abstract form. While the commissionednature of her many public sculptures demand-ed that Raymond give sculptural life to easilyrecognized subjects, she conceived them in for-mal rather than narrative or symbolic terms.“Content is sort of secondary—it gets me go-ing,” she told an interviewer in 1993. “I studiedwith a Beaux Arts man as well as with somebodywho studied at the Bauhaus. Basically even inthe realistic pieces, the form is the importantthing. It has to be right.”7

The following excerpts from tapes in theMinnesota Historical Society’s oral history col-

4 Susan McDonald, “Minnesota Women Artists: Finding Our Foremothers,” WARM Journal, Autumn 1982, p. 3.5 Brataas, “The Bigger the Better,” 5.6 Mary Abbe, “At 89, Evelyn Raymond Sculpts a New Niche,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 22, 1997, p. F8;

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Apr. 28, 1998, p. B7. 7 Vince Leo, “An Interview with Evelyn Raymond: It Has to be Right,” Artpaper, June 1993, p. 16, 17.

A Raymond Sculpture Tour

The following sculptures by Evelyn Raymondrepresent more than 50 years of her public com-missions in Minnesota:

Bronco Stadium, U.S. Highway 71,International Falls: bas relief of athletes,poured concrete, 1942

Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd,4801 France Avenue South, Minneapolis:The Good Shepherd, Kasota stone, 1949

University of St. Thomas, T. Merritt andKatherine Coughlan Field House, 2115Summit Avenue, St. Paul: The Family,hammered copper, 1959 (originallycommissioned for 1919 University Avenue,St. Paul)

Fairview-University Medical Center, 2450Riverside Avenue, Minneapolis: Legacy,bronze, 1982

St. Louis Park Recreation Center, 3700Monterey Drive, St. Louis Park: Celebrationof Peace, stainless steel, 1997




lection give the flavor of the artist’s thought andexpression in her own words. The tapes areavailable for listening in the library at theMinnesota History Center in St. Paul.

I was born in Duluth in 1908, from Frenchand Canadian stock. . . . I think those particularpeople have a lot to do with Minnesota, and Ilike being a Minnesotan. I think artists shouldhave roots.

My father used to build roads in northernMinnesota, and we would go with him in thesummertime, my family. It would be like camp-ing out all summer, and they would hire asmany as 200 people. . . . My dad would build ashack, a tarpaper shack for us, and we’d have anarmy blanket for a door. We went light, we trav-eled light, and I think that’s where I began tostart creating things, because we didn’t take toysor anything. We made things out of twigs andour imagination. I learned how to make a whis-tle out of a willow.

Nellie Pierson, my mother’s name was, andshe was a lovely Swedish lady. When we werebuilding roads with my dad, she would be theonly woman . . . and she dressed in riding skirts,corduroy riding skirts. She was so pretty. Andthen she wore a holster with revolvers in it. . . .When my dad would go ahead to build the nextaddition, so that they could move the crew andus, she would be all by herself. I mean, the lonewoman in this camp. She was pretty much of apioneer herself. . . .

I’ve stayed in Minnesota. I love Minnesota.I love being a part of it, and I don’t think of

Minnesota as being a prairie state, because wealways lived in Duluth, amongst the rocks andthe lake. As children, we used to go on picnicswith our parents and climb the rocks and thehills in West Duluth, and then later on we livedup near the other end of town, where you couldgo down by the lake and crawl around all thebig craggy rocks. I just feel that it’s more sculp-tural where I come from than if you were in aprairie area. . . .

When I was in Central [High School, Du-luth], I always wanted to be a sculptor. Eversince I was a kid, when I even looked at books,I didn’t want things to be flat. I could look atthem and hope that they’d get so I could feelthem, so that I could feel something, ratherthan just have pictures. Color has never beenone of my important things in my life. I like tex-ture. I like the natural quality of wood andstone, and I just kind of come through that nat-urally through my life as a pioneer, I guess. . . .

We used to have an old book from theSt. Louis World’s Fair that we got from someplace, and there were a lot of pictures in that. Iremember kind of wearing that out looking atit. But I know I didn’t come from any kind oftypical family with art, but I do . . . feel that theywere craftsmen and they were sensitive. I mean,the houses my grandfather built. . . . And seeingmy dad make those lovely boats. . . .

The last year I was in high school, she [myteacher] entered a drawing I made [in a nation-al competition], a charcoal drawing I made ofthe kids going up and down the stairs in thehigh school, and I won first prize in drawing.

And then I tried for a scholarship, becausemy mother really had a pretty tough time tosupport kids at what she was doing. And some-how I managed to scrape up $200, I think iswhat the tuition cost a year at the art school inMinneapolis. It used to be called the Minnea-polis School of Art.

Mr. Charles Wells had been head of thesculpture department for 20-some years at theart school. He was a Beaux Arts fellow and hismain thrust was academic art. But John Haleyhad just been to Europe on a Van Derlip schol-arship, a young man. He stretched his two yearsto three years and studied in Paris. He studied atthe Bauhaus, and he brought back with himthese marvelous things of the modern art thatwere so fascinating. . . . And because I was soenamored of this modern stuff that John Haleyhad brought, and Mr. Wells was so very interest-ed in helping me go my own way, so I was doing,I think, the first abstract sculpture ever done at

The Pierson family, about 1900: Raymond’s grandfather GustavWilhelm is seated at center; her mother Nellie is the girl at left in theback row.



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the art school. Mr. [Edmund] Kopietz [MSAdirector] called me in, and because I was a schol-arship student, he thought he ought to tell methat modern art wasn’t going to go anyplace andI’d be wise not to continue that particular bent.

Then the end of that term, after two years,they decided to let Mr. Wells go, and JohnHaley, also. . . . and being a kind of basically ashy kid, but if I wanted something, I seemed tohave enough wherewithal to go after it. . . . Twoof us got up a petition, and we tried to get asmany students as we could to sign the petitionthat we’d leave the art school if these two menweren’t kept on as instructors. . . . Twenty-five ofus did leave, and . . . Mr. Wells got a place for usdown at the Sexton Building [in downtownMinneapolis]. . . .

He [painter LeRoy Turner] came in this lit-tle school that we called the Minneapolis ArtStudents League. . . . It being Depression, wecould just toss in what little money we could get,and we bought the lumber, and under

Mr. Wells’s direction, we made the modelingstands and set up our studio in the old SextonBuilding. And actually it was a school thatseemed to do rather well, and a studio, consid-ering that it was Depression. I was the businessmanager, and . . . if you put an ad in the paperfor a model, there’d be people lined up for twoblocks because there was a need of work. . . .

We were all mostly from out of town, kind ofsmall-town kids, and . . . we always traveled kindof in gangs so that we could share whatever wehad, and the end of the day we’d maybe have atea bag that we’d get awful high on, just sharinga tea bag. They were lovely, simple days as com-pared to nowadays. . . .

After I went for not quite two years to ournew school, this Art Students League, my moth-er became ill. . . . She had a heart condition,and I had to go home, back to Duluth. I tookher place, and I was up at five o’clock, cookingfor the milk men. We had a big dairy, 160 cows,and we had 600 acres. . . .

Raymond at work in her studio, about 1950. ERG, the figure she sculpted in 1938 for her application to theWPA’s Federal Art Project, stands on the mantel immediately to her left, along with the bronze bust of DmitriMitropoulos, music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.




I used to get ten dollars a month, do any-thing I wanted with it, which I did. I mostlybought magazines, art magazines, which therewas, during the Depression . . . wonderful littlemagazines that were started, of philosophy, psy-chology, art. I read every art book I think Icould find in the public library, and I read allnight. . . . When I ran out of books on art, thenI would take each country and find out whotheir best authors were. I’d take a country at atime and try to find out. I would read.

We were . . . about eight miles out of town,and I never did drive. And so if you’re cookingfor that many people, you’re pretty steady inthe kitchen. I remember three hours of washingdishes. But I didn’t live in the world I was in,because I was constantly reading stuff. . . .

I was out there eight years. When I left in1938, my mother died. I took care of her eightmonths. She had cancer. . . . I tried to get a jobthen, and there was nothing to be had, natural-ly, doing art work. . . . I could have gotten a jobcooking anyplace, but I wasn’t interested at thatpoint.

It happened at that time one of the peo-ple that I was interviewed by knew Clem Haup-ers and knew about WPA. Of course, I knewClem from way back. . . . He was the director ofthe WPA art project for seven states, seven oreight states, and he told me he knew I had beencooking for eight years, and he wanted to knowif I could still do sculpture. So he asked me to dosome sculpture to prove that I could do sculp-ture, and that piece that you people have [in theMinnesota Historical Society collection] is thefirst piece I did after eight years. That piece hasbeen in national magazines and . . . I have a feel-ing that’s my most famous piece. . . . I named itERG. I guess that means a unit of power.

Well, Clem did give me a job. . . . Therewere a lot of different people on the WPA be-sides artists . . . which was so exciting for a sculp-tor. In our department, there would be a masterplaster caster, woodcarvers, and just people whoneeded jobs. . . . It was a wonderful educationfor me, because in our school you never gotstone carving and you didn’t get much in theway of plaster casting. . . .

I don’t know how many of us were on theproject then, but it was quite a few of us. Iremember Miriam Ibling, who I still think isone of Minnesota’s better woman artists, thatshe taught dressmaking, and she was a finemural painter. . . .

There was a big department that was run byStan Fenelle, and he was a fine painter, was a

good friend of Cameron Booth, and Stan was incharge of a department. They must have hadthirty people in that department, whose onlybusiness was to copy artifacts from pioneers andIndians and whatnot. They were building a bigbook of some kind [the Index of American Design]. . . drawing pictures of early pioneer tools andquilts and all that kind of stuff. . . .

We all had to teach, and I can rememberwe’d have people standing on their necks. Imean, there were so many people. They onlyhad to pay 25 cents a class. And I rememberhaving a gentleman that collected old fabrics,kind of like a junk collector, and I had a womanthat her husband was the head of Munsingwear.It was a wide collection of different people andexecutives. Your classes were just filled with peo-ple at night, and everybody had to teach some-thing that came to Walker. . . .

Those of us who were sculptors in the sculp-ture department . . . did public projects . . . andwe were all given a problem, and whoever wasin charge of the building could take pick ofwhatever design they wanted. . . .

About six months after I landed there, theypicked mine for International Falls. It was a sta-dium, a high-school stadium. . . . They got thebright idea I should do it as a piece to interestthe crowd at Walker. . . . So this piece of sculp-ture I was going to do was a bas relief. It was 12feet [high] and 18 feet long. I had to do it inthree sections, and they set up scaffolding andstuff for me. . . .

Women didn’t wear slacks, as a general rule,then . . . [and] sometimes there’d be maybe 100or so people watching you. It would be, proba-bly, a good idea to have slacks on, I figured, andI had to make my own slacks, because I couldn’tbuy any. I was a pretty good dressmaker. I hadbeen in the habit of making clothes myself formy family, my mother and sister and stuff, so Iwas a pretty good dressmaker, which helped mein my sculpture, actually. The sculpture I do inmetal is basically making patterns. So thereagain, something I did in my youth was helpfulfor me when I grew up. . . .

Anyway, after coming from a farm and work-ing by yourself and washing dishes and then[you] find yourself in the center of the WalkerArt Center with several—I don’t know if therewere 100 people, but it seemed to me there wassuch a crowd all the time. And I’m a basicallyshy person. After all, if you’ve been a hermit foreight years, you get pretty shy. And look aroundand see all those people staring at you, andthen you’re doing your first big job, it’s not alleasy. . . .



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After doing two panels and getting up hun-dreds of pounds of clay, the building began tosag. It was right in the lobby, and it was such awonderful place to work, glass all overhead. Youcouldn’t ask for a more wonderful studio. . . .Anyway, they made me go downstairs in one ofthe small studios that . . . just had a basementwindow. The light was terrible, the space wassmall, and I did the third panel downstairs, andI keep saying “in the closet.” But I never like tolook at it, because the third panel was just notright, but what could I do? . . .

The plaster casters made a mold over it. . . .In January of 1942 we took those molds up toInternational Falls. I had 17 fellows with me,and they were some of the casters and some ofthe people who just needed jobs that were withus to do the work. . . .

The contractor of the building wanted meto stay with the board, somebody on the schoolboard, because he thought it would be betterthan having me stay in this crummy old hotel.But nobody would take me in because theywere afraid they were taking in a WPA worker.So once in a while he’d come over in the after-noon and take me over to a neighboring townfor a short cocktail or something.

Anyway, the only thing I could do at nightwas go with these 17 fellows, and I used to kidmyself that I was Snow White and the 17dwarves. . . .

But then I got kind of bored. We were upthere for 21 days, and it was well below zero allthe time we were up there, and the sculpturehad to be cast in one fell swoop. You couldn’tstart casting it. It was an experiment. It wasgoing to be done in cement in one piece, and itwas 12 inches thick, and you don’t pour cementbelow zero weather. And International Falls getscold, so they had to work when they had tobuild a big tarp over the front of the building tokind of cover it up, and then they had a littlestove down below to keep it warm.

During that time, while they were gettingscaffolding and all this stuff built up, I wasn’tdoing very much, and so I went to the library tosee if they’d give me some books and give me acard, and I decided to read Thomas Wolfe. Youdon’t read Thomas Wolfe in International Falls.His words just fly off the page, and you get soexcited. . . .

Raymond’s concrete relief of football players, cast inplace at International Falls’s Bronco Stadium byWPA workers in 1942




And right after [the sculpture was poured],of course, the money was withdrawn from WPAbecause of the war, and so I don’t know whodecided they’d start a school [at the Walker ArtCenter]. . . . But Mac LeSueur was director ofthe school. It was all down in the basement . . .and there was Leon Sorkin, who taught early,first-year drawing, and there was Bert Old, whotaught painting. . . . And Bill Norman taught. . . commercial art. And Mac’s wife [Lorraine]taught children, on Saturday, painting. I taughtthe sculpture department. I taught drawing. . . .

I did a lot of extra work when I was at theWalker. I became a lecturer. I wasn’t paid forwhat I did, but since the first month I came toWalker, I got involved, under WPA even, in giv-ing lectures to advertise Walker, and I would goto any group that wanted to hear me—littlewomen’s groups, men’s luncheon groups,church groups, library groups—and I’d take abucket of clay, and maybe a student, and do ahead and talk about sculpture. . . . I talked to awomen’s group that had met for 22 years,retired schoolteachers. . . . When I got throughdoing my demonstration, one of the little ladiespaddled up to me and said, “You know, we hada quartet last week, but you were a lot morefun.” And I’ve always held that as one of thenicer compliments. . . .

I couldn’t talk unless I had a bucket of clayin my hand, to work with clay. I was not a pro-fessional lecturer, and I pretty much changedfrom the farm, where I was a loner for eightyears, and to be suddenly put in the midst. Mylife has always been either I’m quite a bit alone,and then suddenly I have more people aroundme. People used to say about me that I kneweverybody in Minneapolis. . . . That’s why I say Ihave touched more people with sculpture thanany other sculptor. Somehow I seem to have anability to get known by people who are not espe-cially into art, and I think that’s fine, and thefact that my sculpture’s out on the streets whereeverybody can see it. . . .

During the war, at my night class one night, agentleman came. . . . He was an architect, andhis name was Mr. [James B.] Hills from thearchitectural firm of Hills, Gilbert[son], andHayes. They mostly built churches. Anyway, heasked me, he said he had a customer that collect-ed horse’s heads. Did I have a student that wouldbe willing to make a horse’s head for him?

And so with my usual charm, I said, “Howwould you like it if somebody came into youroffice and asked one of your draftsmen todesign a building?”

He said, “Well, would you do it?”

And I said I would, and I did, and I got $75for it. . . . When the war was over, he asked meto do the Good Shepherd [at Lutheran Churchof the Good Shepherd in Minneapolis], andthat was pretty big stuff. . . . That was my firstbig piece that was a private commission, and Imade the big sum of $3,000 on that. I don’tknow how much that was worth in those days.But it’s a very beloved piece, and they still askme out there for every doing they have, andthose old people come up with tears in theireyes and tell me how much they love it. . . .

I did a half-scale model. I did an eight-footmodel. . . . And because you don’t really getenough money for carving and not being a pro-fessional carver to use power tools or anything, Imade it as simple as I could so the designcouldn’t be ruined by other people. I did wantto carve on some of the more delicate parts, butthe stone carvers wouldn’t let me in the stoneyard because I would have to become a memberof the union, and they wouldn’t let womenbecome members of the union. So I didn’t do

Raymond modeling a bust of Minnesota novelistFrederick Manfred, about 1940. The finished bustwas cast in concrete and ultimately destroyed. “Ioffered to give it to him, but he said it was so strong.He had a feeling it would make him feel weak . . . .He changed his mind after I broke it up, because Ididn’t have any place to put it. It was too late then.”



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any carving on it myself, but . . . I checked it asoften as I could, and I did make the design verysimple and strong, so they really couldn’t go toofar wrong with it. . . .

That was my first private commission, bigprivate commission. . . . But the largest piece is20 foot by 20 foot over on [the St. Paul campusof the University of] St. Thomas. That originallywas done for the Mutual Service Casualty Com-pany at 1919 University Avenue [in St. Paul]. . . .in hammered copper. It took me about twoyears to do. I did a lot on that, but I did work inthe sheet metal shop. . . . At that time, they hada lot of good Scandinavian craftsmen, and it wasfun working with them. I did the smaller thingsin my studio, and the bigger things I oversawthe shop. . . . That was done in 1959.

There’s a [church in a] quonset hut inSt. Louis Park [St. George’s Episcopal Church],an Episcopalian quonset hut, and I was contact-ed by the pastor to do something for them.They had nothing, including money. I wasasked to do a victory cross, a crucifix, a font,and sconces, even mix the paint for them.Anyway, I think I got $1,500 for six months’work on that. . . .

I did a victory cross, and I had part of it castand part of it fabricated. And I did a crucifixthat I had spring up from the prayer rail. Itdidn’t really have a cross behind it, but thefigure made a cross and it kind of sprung up infront of the victory cross, which was on the backwall of the quonset hut. And then I did a font,and then these wonderful sconces. I thoughtthey were so fun. They were over three feet tall,and I thought they were really very nice. . . .

When I finished that job, I ended up havingone of my first cancer surgeries, and I was in thehospital directly after we put that up. They havea newspaper, Episcopalian national newspaper,and they ran pictures of it on the cover. . . . Butthere was so much controversy over it. It was thefirst Episcopalian to do anything sort of mod-ern, and I remember reading one article said itmust have been done by a drunken sculptor.There were some people liked it. . . .

The sad part of it is, after a few years, whenthey got enough money to build a traditionalchurch, they sold the victory cross to a littlechurch in the Dominican Republic. They cut offmy crucifix and hung it on a wall in the lobby,and I don’t know what happened to the rest. Itwas very sad. You know, you have a feeling thateverything you do will eventually be torn downfor progress. . . .

As a kid, I’ve been to Sunday school in justabout every church except the Catholic church.

Anyway, I think I have a certain sense, a feelingthat what I do, I do with a lot of help from what-ever you want to call it, a higher power or what-ever, and I think I am, in my own way, a personwho recognizes that there is something besidesjust what’s here. I don’t know, I suppose oneshould really belong to a church, but I don’t.But I’ve worked for so many churches. In myown way, I think I have a sense of religion, orwhatever the word would do better than that.

Oh, the Maria Sanford, that’s kind of inter-esting, because after I left Walker, I didn’t haveany place to go. Any money we had coming tous, Walker kept back because they felt maybethey had overpaid us during the years we hadbeen there.

So I rented an apartment on 31st andHennepin [in Minneapolis], and there again,the loyalty I get from people has been one ofthe amazements of my life. About at least 20 or30 people came with me from my night class-es. . . so I opened up classes in what was the liv-ing room of this big old apartment. . . . Wheredid we go from there? There was an old duplexacross the street. It was a hundred years old,

The Good Shepherd, Raymond’s Kasota stonefigure on the Lutheran church of the same name inMinneapolis. “I took one of my students and we wentover to the university farm campus, and he picked upa lamb and posed for me.”

MN History Text 56/2 8/21/07 7:50 AM 3


man of the committee. For four years, thewomen’s federation groups tried to get awoman in the [United States] Capitol. Everystate is allowed to honor two pioneers, andMinnesota, I think, was either the first or sec-ond to honor a woman, and the Federation ofWomen’s Clubs had worked for years to accom-plish this fact. . . . Everybody I met, I think, Iasked them to write letters. And then I made amodel of Maria. I got hold of a couple pictures.Pictures were hard to come by. I really didn’thave a profile. . . .

So I did enter a competition, and I didanother model beside the one I sent already. Idid a head then. I had done a full figure before.Maybe I’m not one of these very aggressivefemales, but if I make up my mind, I really workon something. And then I was fortunateenough to win the competition. . . .

Maria was one of the first women professorsat the university, and she taught all kinds ofpoliticians and she sold more war bonds thanany other person. She got sewers for Minnea-polis. She was less than five feet tall, but just alittle ball of fire, I guess, and she did so manythings. She was a very admirable little figure. . . .

Anyway, it was a $25,000 commission, and$6,000 was taken out for expenses for the com-mittee to go to Washington. And out of that$19,000, I had to pay for the casting in bronze. .. . I had people from St. Paul Statuary help mecast that. You have to pay for insurance. Youhave to pay for delivery. I had to pay for a gran-ite block with a bronze plaque on it, and I hadto rent a space because my studio wasn’t tallenough. You don’t end up with a lot of money. Ithink I ended up with $7,000 for that.

I was at one of these [women’s club] lun-cheons I had to attend, and there was aMrs. Goode. I thought she looked a little bitlike Maria and asked her to come over and posefor me. And then when I got through doing it,it looked like Mrs. Goode, all right, but it didn’tseem to look like Maria. So I had to do it allover again.

There’s pictures of me that were taken. Thiswas well over half a year’s job, and I look likeI’ve got great huge circles under my eyes. It wasreally a rough time, and I wanted to do the bestI could to honor Maria.

Oh, there was this huge dedication. Theysaid there were more people came to the dedi-cation of that sculpture than any other piecethat they had and could remember since sculp-ture had been up. There were people, becauseof their connection with the university. Therewere past governors. It was a huge crowd. I was


Raymond working on the crucifix for St. George’s Episcopal Church,temporarily housed in a quonset hut in St. Louis Park, 1953

and I decided that that would be a better placefor me to have my little school. . . . I was therefor eight and a half years. I had classes. I hadday classes, and I always had three night classes.I had about 40 kids every Saturday. . . .

It was a very hot day, and the doorbell rang.There was a little elderly lady came to the door,and I thought she wanted a drink of water. Iasked her to come in. She said she’d just comeback from Stillwater, and she had heard twowomen talking on the bus [about commission-ing the Maria Sanford sculpture for the U.S.Capitol] and several names were mentioned,and they mentioned my name.

This little lady was a china painter that wasin my block, who kind of felt that we were kin-dred souls because she was a china painter. Shesaid, “I think it’s a big commission. You bettertry for it. You better contact somebody.” . . .

I contacted [state Representative] SallyLuther. . . . She gave me the name of the chair-



SUMMER 1998 95

nervous. I was really nervous. Governor [Elmer]Andersen, bless his heart, he was running forgovernor the next year. Governor [Orville]Freeman was there. . . .

I was scared to get up. They had a specialdais of whatever you call it for the principals,and Governor Andersen, bless his heart, hetalked, and it made it sound like I wasMichelangelo. Michelangelo would have beennothing compared to me. I am basically kind ofshy, and I didn’t know how I was going to get offthe dais and walk across the rotunda and takethe flag off Maria. And Governor Freemanescorted me across, and when I got off the dais,he winked at me and somehow broke the ten-sion. He could probably see that I was so scaredthat I couldn’t walk.

There was an elderly gentleman that was inthe invited guests, and he came up to me andhe said he had studied with Maria, and he hadtears in his eyes. He said, “I don’t know how youdid it. Exactly like her, exactly the way she’dcome into the classroom”. . . . I really felt that Ihad done well. I mean, I felt that I had donethat one fine. I don’t know if any art peopleever wrote it up, but I didn’t care, because I feltit was good.

I will say that I’m strictly a feminist as far asjoining women’s organizations. I don’t think I’veever lost a job because I was a woman. When Ifirst started being a sculptor, I thought I’d justput my initials down when I’d show sculpture,because I would probably be not taken as seri-ously. . . . But I never had to do that.

I really can’t ever complain that I was dis-criminated against because of my sex. I’ve beenextremely lucky. Anyway, it seemed to me thatthey seemed to think I could do the job. . . .

I’m the last of the Roosevelt Democrats. Ithink the WPA project was one of the moreimportant things, I think, done for art in thiswhole country at any time. I think so manyartists, of every kind of art, were given a chance.I could not have accomplished what I’ve donewithout that help. It was only three years, and Idon’t think they spent too much money on mefor $76 a month, but I’m ever so grateful. . . .

When you do big sculpture, especially as alocal artist, you don’t get a lot of money. . . . Youjust have to have a great love for doing big stuff,which I do. I don’t know, I think in the past,somewhere in my past life I lived on Easter

Island or something, where they made thoseheads; or I lived in Egypt. . . . I gave this design[Celebration of Peace] for St. Louis Park recently.It’s 27 feet tall, and I gave them the design. Ihad tried to sell it to them a few years ago, but Igave them the design because I just feel a needto have another big sculpture up. . . .

It’s so hard to make a living as an artist inMinnesota, and for years I think I was the onlyone that was really making a living at sculpture.. . . I mean, it was difficult, and I at least mademy living. My classes supported my big jobs, andmy big jobs kind of supported my classes. So Ithink if anything, one of my claims to fame, ifthere is any, is that I made my living actually as asculptor in Minnesota.

Dedication of Raymond’s bronze statue of educator Maria L.Sanford in the U.S. Capitol, 1958. Minnesota Governor Orville L.Freeman is at far left, next to University of Minnesota presidentJames L. Morrill; Raymond, in the black dress, stands next tofuture governor Elmer L. Andersen.

All photographs are in MHS collections; the one on p. 92 is from the Minneapolis Star-Journal, p. 94 is from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune,and p. 95 is by Del Ankers Photographers, Washington, D.C.



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