The Presidents Heads
David Adickes is a Texan and a sculptor with big ideas - like a 67 foot sculpture of Sam Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, entitled “Tribute to Courage” that you can see in Huntsville, Texas. Another grandiose idea was to have busts of the Presidents, approximately 18-20 feet tall, so that, unlike at Mount Rushmore, you could get close and personal to these historical figures. So $10 million dollars, numerous legal and zoning problems, and four years, later the project began.
In February, 2004, Presidents Park qualified for “museum status” and opened in Williamsburg, Virginia, with the financial support and assistance of entrepreneur, Everette Haley Newman. But lack of public support, a recession, and investors wanting to cut their losses, forced the park to close in 2010, six years and 350,000 visitors later. The property was sold but the buyer didn’t want the busts. So Newman reached out to a local businessman, Howard Hankins, to see if he would “recycle” the sculptures.
Photo Credit : A. Currell
The Park in Williamsburg
In a 2015 interview with a local newspaper, the Daily Press, Hankins said “They called me and wanted to know if I would come down there and crush [the heads] and haul them away…I said ‘heck no, can I have ‘em?’ I’m going to preserve them…I just feel it was very educational…To destroy that stuff didn’t look right to me.”
So with a lot of effort Hankins moved the busts as best he could to his property in Croaker, Virginia.
David Adickes was born in Huntsville, Texas in 1927, and studied under renowned sculptor Fernand Léger in 1949 for two years. When informed of the plight of the Heads and his work, he said, “I was totally shocked and disappointed… pissed off and devastated and sad and all the rest…Now they look like a graveyard of our greatest heroes, of our American presidents. That’s sad to see.” Adickes is still an active artist at age 92. And still creating large scale sculptures.
A shot of Adickes studio when the heads were in production.
So many people have visited this location and gotten great images, that anything else just seems like following in their footsteps; like planting your tripod in the same place that Ansel Adams shot “Thunderstorm, Yosemite Valley, 1945.”
Plus it was a flat light day, so I decided that rather than follow in the footsteps of others, I’d reimagine them and reinterpret this place, and the statues, like the remains of a fallen civilization from a dystopian movie set. Remember that last scene from the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes” where Charlton Heston comes upon the remnants of the Statue of Liberty?
So what if a thousand years from now, wandering tribes come across these statues - would they look at them the same way we look at Stonehenge? Would they wonder if these were gods our civilization worshipped? If aliens landed in Croaker what would they make of these statues?
I hope you have as much fun looking at the work as I had creating it.