By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Sculptor Nina Akamu, whose "Mount 'n' View" will be unveiled May 9 in conjunction with her lecture at the 2005 Dogwood Fine Arts Festival, made her first foray to snowy Dowagiac Monday.
Best known for completing a 24-foot-high charger "Il Cavallo" 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) conceived the largest equine statue ever and Europeans were discovering North America, Akamu visited to review the site at the corner of Commercial Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, outside Dogwood headquarters in Huntington bank.
The identity of the donor and details of the design will be released later, according to her host, Thelda Mathews of the Visual Arts Committee.
Much is known, of course, about Akamu's work on the 56-hand, seven-section bronze horse half a millennium in the making, of which one was dedicated Sept. 10, 1999, in Milan, Italy.
An identical cast was unveiled Oct. 1, 1999, at the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.
Akamu lives on Mountain View Road in upstate New York, but "I don't have a mountain view, actually," she said.
She also professes to be afraid of heights, but looked like a circus aerial artist clambering up scaffolding to the top of the horse.
Mathews initially approached Akamu about lecturing at the Dogwood through Tuck Langland of Granger, Ind., creator of "Dance of Creation" in Farr Park and "Resting Dancer" by City Hall.
Akamu chalks up her involvement with the da Vinci horse to "synchronicity."
Besides her dozen years in Italy, "I have a reputation for sculpting in a particular style which might be considered classical. I have a certain kind of training. Leonardo's teacher is one of my favorite sculptors. The original sculpture by Charles Dent came into the Tallix foundry in Beacon, N.Y. Quite a number of well-known sculptors suggested I go look at it because there aren't very many sculptors who specialize in horses and large animals and are trained in a particular way.
Akamu became lead sculptor in creating the eight-foot master model in plaster, which she and a team of seven assistants enlarged about three times in clay. It took two years to transfer da Vinci's sketches into a colossal three-dimensional horse.
She joined the project in the fall of 1996 and will be lecturing on it in detail in Dowagiac next spring.
Dent was a United Airlines pilot from Pennsylvania who saw copies of da Vinci's sketches rediscovered in Spain in 1966 and sculpted a rough clay model of the charger with the idea of building the long-lost animal as a gift from the American people to Italy.
Dent died in 1994, but the organization he set in motion raised $4 million to see the dream through to fruition, according to a September 1998 cover story in Smithsonian magazine.
Akamu, a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, was born in Oklahoma City and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, where the American sculptor of Chinese and Japanese descent received her bachelor's degree in fine art in painting.
She worked as a sculptor in Florence for five years and for seven years in Pietrasanta, Italy.
Akamu also lived in Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan and Delaware growing up. She spent four years in New Mexico until moving to New York about seven years ago.
To pay tribute to Leonardo and to Dent, Akamu engraved their names in the eyes of the monumental horse that intimately intertwines their vision.
Akamu also designed the national Japanese-American memorial 600 yards from the Capitol in Washington while working on the horse.