Libertas

I evaluated every way we could make her. Foam — the way theater builds its props — was out early; up close it never reads as marble. A farm of cheap plastic FDM printers wouldn't hold together at the scale required. The answer was binder jetting: sand bound with adhesive, building marble-like mass and surface layer by layer. Freshmade 3D's work was impressive enough that I went to Youngstown to see it in person before we greenlit it.

The scale came from my model of the room. At 80%, she would hold the end of the exhibit hall exactly — full presence, never cropped by the sightline. I also ran the size and weight study, because she'd stand on the museum's second floor, where weight was a ceiling, not a detail. She had to be heavy enough to feel significant and light enough to stay within the floor's load limit.

We didn't want her lightweight and insignificant. Insignificant reads as cheap.

A hundred-plus scans don't align themselves. I aligned them into a single, unwieldy mesh with seams and overlap artifacts — flaws that would have printed faithfully if no one caught them. A 3D animation artist then did the fine, patient cleanup that only that craft really teaches.

In parallel, Brendan Ho, a faculty member in the School of Architecture, modeled the exhibit cases and companion prints in Rhino, so the entire show could be seen and approved before anything was committed to print.

The crown's rays were the catch. There wasn't enough scan data to reconstruct them — only enough to measure them, tip to tip. So I rebuilt them by hand in Fusion 360 from reference photos taken on site.

The figure was printed by Freshmade 3D / Humtown in Youngstown, Ohio. Binder jetting laid down sand and adhesive in thin layers, building a body with marble's weight and grain. Walking the shop floor mid-print and finding Liberty's arm already taking shape was its own kind of awe.

There's an argument inside the material. A traditional marble figure is carved from a quarried mountain. This one was built from sand and binder — abundant, and far gentler on the world. Then it was primed and finished, with Tammy's team painting test pieces before ever committing to the full statue.

Sand and glue, behaving like marble.

The base was fabricated by students — welded steel, height-adjustable, with swappable fascia. Beneath it, spreader plates we designed distribute her weight evenly across the floor, keeping the load inside its PSI limit. Nearly indestructible, and honestly a standard-bearer for how a statue stand should be built. (One or two of the welds are mine, just to have a hand in it.)

Sisters in Liberty: From Florence, Italy, to New York, New York opened at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration on October 17, 2019 — the first exhibition the Opera di Santa Croce had ever mounted outside Italy. Across the water from her sister on Liberty Island, she held the end of the hall exactly as modeled. Visitors who grew up going to church at Santa Croce said it was like standing in Florence again, and the quality of the figure itself was never in question.

She didn't stand alone. Companion prints filled the cases, and a poetry experience from David Hassler and the Wick Poetry Center ran on kiosks designed by the marketing firm Each and Every, which I supported. The project also lived online on a site I built on AWS — WordPress on the Divi framework — with marketing design by Alyssa Mazey.

They were looking at the real thing — through the hands of everyone who cared to keep it.