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Olmsted Bronze Premiers at North Carolina Arboretum07-05-16 | News

Olmsted Bronze Premiers at North Carolina Arboretum
An 8-foot bronze statue of Frederick Law Olmsted took two years to make.

"It was important for me to create a sculpture which embodied the idea of Frederick Law Olmsted as a visionary of monumental proportions," explained sculptor Zenos Frudakis.

A statue of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 – 1903) commissioned by the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, N.C., was unveiled at a ceremony on Earth Day, April 22, in the arboretum's Blue Ridge Court.

From concept to completion, the 8-foot bronze statue took Philadelphia-based sculptor Zenos Frudakis nearly two years to complete. Frudakis has created over 100 works in nearly four decades of professional work, including the 20' long, 8' high bronze "Freedom Sculpture" in Philadelphia. For the arboretum statue, Frudakis consulted with Witold Rybczynski, professor emeritus of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century.

Frudakis explained that the sculpture of Frederick Law Olmsted holds in his hands an "abstract topographic map, which came from his mind and became the land that he stood on."

The North Carolina Arboretum was established in 1986 on 434-acres in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest just south of Asheville. The public garden is an affiliate of the 17-campus University of North Carolina system. A bronze sculpture of Olmsted has been a dream of the arboretum for many years; the reason being that Olmsted envisioned a research arboretum on George Vanderbilt's 125,000-acre Biltmore Estate in Asheville, a plan that was never realized.

Landscape architects are of course quite familiar with Olmsted's career. It wasn't until Olmsted was 35 that he began a career that would earn him the title of father of landscape architecture in the U.S. Previous to finding his lauded career niche, Olmsted had success as a farmer, writer, journalist and businessman.