Most students making the trek to Bloomberg are too busy dreading physics to enjoy the scenery, but they've probably noticed the array of newly-restored animal sculptures in the Bufano Sculpture Garden.
A mere decade after vandals wielding hammers first damaged the 10 fanciful animal sculptures, the stone menagerie has been brought back to life by Steven Tatti, an expert art conservator from New York who was hired to patch up the cracked heads and chipped snouts.
The marble and granite sculptures include renditions of a bear with cubs, an owl, an elephant, a cat, a horse, a snail, two different camels, a ram and a penguin, the last of which remains headless because there was no photo to guide Tatti in his restoration. A distinctively sleek and modern style unites the sculptures, which add a note of whimsy to Homewood campus.
The garden pieces were created by the San Francisco-based sculptor Beniamino Bufano, an artist whose radical politics and sweeping visual iconography belied his tiny five-foot stature. A rootless free spirit, Bufano settled on San Francisco after years of traveling the world at the turn of the century and spent most of his professional career there.
The animal sculptures at Hopkins represent a departure for Bufano, whose work usually incorporates his political ideals through religious images. According to an online biography, Bufano's works include phallic depictions of the Lady Madonna and a sculpture of St. Francis made from melted guns. A staunch pacifist, Bufano was also personal friends with Mahatma Gandhi and Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen.
At the height of Bufano's career, American author Henry Miller praised him, remarking that the sculptor "will outlive our civilization and probably be better known, better understood, both as a man and an artist, five thousand years hence."
While his work has been widely displayed around San Francisco, Bufano, a native Italian, has little name recognition on the East Coast. In 1983, thirteen years after his death, Bufano's son Erskine presented and dedicated the garden to Hopkins in an attempt to bring about wider acknowledgment of his father's legacy.
Monumental statements and use of smoothed and rounded granite may strongly characterize Bufano's work, but he is perhaps best known for having sent his own severed finger to former President Woodrow Wilson in protest of World War I--surely a political twist on the "tortured artiste" gesture of dispatching appendages first coined by Vincent Van Gogh.
Hopkins undertook the project of restoring the Bufano Sculpture Garden in 2000 as a part of the "master plan," a broader campus-wide effort to make Homewood more livable for students. According to the Baltimore Sun, the entire restoration took approximately a week for Tatti and his crew of assistants to complete.
The university paid Tatti $21,000 for his repair work. The former chief curator of sculpture at the D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tatti has also restored outdoor monuments in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland.
The result of Tatti's labor is a seamless reconstruction of Bufano's languid animal creations, blending both the natural shape and character of each creature with the lines and palate of the surrounding wooded environment.
