Talk:M.L. Snowden

Untitled
Hello there. I believe this biography is valid ofr an encyclopedia because the creative professional in question has a direct creative lineage with Auguste Rodin (he passed his tools down to her) - creator the Thinker.

This is stated in the article. Please advise as to how to correctly present this information.

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Something odd is going on
This article is filled with citations—but few seem to be verifiable. Many seem only to exist as citations on Snowden's own sites. E.g.: "M.L Snowden is considered to be the last living methods heir of the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, since she employs a range of proprietary Rodin chemical formulas, building and modelling methods in her work."

I'm going to move text unsupported by reachable reliable sources here, and move it back to the article if and when such sources can be found. PRRfan (talk) 17:01, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Intro
"...and bronze metallurgist who has won awards and commissions. The sculptor is known for her Geological Coreium collection of bronzes. Some have called her among the greatest figurative sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A mentor growing up was Chief Nipo Strongheart of the Yakima Nation.

M.L. Snowden is recognized for breaking down barriers for women's achievements in heavy metal arts and creative disciplines in otherwise male-dominated fields. Snowden works alone, crafting her work without models or assistants in the clay stage, while carrying out the major steps of crafting heavy bronzes in her foundries in Los Angeles, California, and in Paris, France. Snowden has invented advanced metallurgical techniques and processes and invented techniques, formulas and compositional constructions that advance the metallurgical art and science of lost wax bronze.

Art education
Snowden's art education was encouraged by her father's professional colleagues, Paul Manship and Isamu Noguchi. She had art instruction from Salvador Dalí a family friend since he and her father created artwork for the 1939 New York World's Fair. She also received art instruction and career encouragement from Walt Disney, for whom her father worked as an Imagineer, creating most of the sculptural enlargements for the Disneyland theme park. As a young woman with an interest in experimenting with bronze patinas, she studied color theory with the originator of Synchromism, the painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright. After becoming one of the first women to enroll at Loyola Marymount University in 1970, she studied with Macdonald-Wright's protégé Pauline Khuri-Majoli and was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting and sculpture in 1974. Snowden also studied drawing at Otis College of Art and Design with the Black American draughtsman Charles Wilbert White and received early encouragement from the Black American sculptor Richmond Barthe’.

M.L. Snowden's sculptural compositions for the Geological Coreium were influenced through a decade of studying Chopin's piano music with the feminist pianist, composer, and conductor Ethel Leginska. The sculptor's first art exhibition was hosted by The Los Angeles Patrons of the Fine Arts Foundation headed by Dorothy Buffum Chandler. Her first show with the Patrons was organized by the silent-era film star and women's self-help author Margery Wilson, who championed Snowden's early art. The artist was inspired by her women mentors including sculptor Malvina Hoffman, whose own sculpture career had been encouraged by Auguste Rodin.

Rodin connection
M.L Snowden is considered to be the last living methods heir of the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, since she employs a range of proprietary Rodin chemical formulas, building and modelling methods in her work. Snowden's Rodin chemical formulas include the historic Fournier Platinum Patina which she uses extensively on her bronzes. Snowden inherited Rodin's tools, techniques, formulas from her father who was taught by the Rodin specialist, Robert Georges Eberhard at Yale University. Before World War I, Eberhard had been a professional assistant and friend to Rodin in his Paris studios. In 1916 in the interest of furthering education, Rodin bequeathed a collection of his tools to Eberhard who was emigrating to America to take up his teaching position at Yale University. Eberhard came to serve as professor and chairman of Yale University's School of Sculpture as well as the Director of Archives from 1917 to 1952. Eberhard gave Rodin's tools to M.L. Snowden's father on his winning the American Prix de Rome of 1927. Inheriting Rodin's tools on the death of her father in 1990, Snowden uses Rodin's loop tool #8 in creating her clay work because of the tool's unique helix serrated structure.

Post-graduate work
In 1974, M.L. Snowden won the TRY Foundation Post-Graduate Grant for European Studies at the Conservatorio Dall’Abaco in Italy. Winning a second Redken Foundation grant presented by Paula Meehan, M.L. Snowden undertook independent art studies at the Louvre in Paris, the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, the Uffizi in Florence and at the Vatican Collections in Rome. Her extended European experience earned Snowden a range of European sculptural prizes and distinctions, including an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree. Back in America, she was elected to serve on the national board of the women's scholars honors society, Kappa Gamma Pi, where she concepted and aided the establishment of the Cornaro Scholarship for post graduate studies. In 1989, M.L. Snowden won America's foremost sculpture prize, the first inaugural Alex Ettl Grant for ”Lifetime Achievement in American Sculpture” presented by the National Sculpture Society. In 1992, she exhibited her bronze “Cataclasis Study” and was named winner of the International Rodin Grand Prize Monumental Figure Competition held in Tokyo, Japan. The International Rodin Competition was hosted by the embassies of 32 nations, including France, Spain and England. The prize was held at Hakone Open-Air Museum, with the museum acquiring Snowden's “Cataclasis Study”for their permanent collection. In 1998 and 2004, the sculptor was awarded two consecutive Carano Gordon Atlanta Commissions to create her vision for experimental bronzes that are now part of the Geological Corieum collection. Additionally, M.L. Snowden was awarded the Presidential Order of Merit “for humanitarian contributions to the art of sculpture” presented by the Academy of the Fine Arts Foundation.

The Geological Coreium
M.L. Snowden's largest sculptural oeuvre is the Geological Coreium, encompassing separate collections of multiple bronzes that have been divided into more than 18 chapters. The sculptures use human figures to describe otherwise abstract geological and scientific phenomena, a statement about humans' impact on the Earth and the cosmos.

Some appraisers and curators have called it among the most extensive fine art bronze collections created in the latter half of the 20th century and in the first decades of the 21st.

Cathedral angels
Chosen from a field of 8,000 sculptors, Snowden was commissioned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Vatican in Rome. Snowden designed and created four golden archangels that float around the Rosso Laguna marble main altar on a suspension system. “The Great Golden Angels of Los Angeles” is considered to be the largest gilt-on-bronze ecclesiastical installation of the modern era. The sculpture uses techniques for casting gold-on-bronze objects that were developed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who taught A. A. Weinman, a collaborator of her father's. The Cathedral and its Main Altar Angels were dedicated by Saint Pope John Paul II in 2002. M.L. Snowden's work was the first group of angels for a permanent setting in the history of the City of Los Angeles. M.L. Snowden's planning drawings were added to the Vatican Collections in Rome.

Other work
While the Geological Coreium has been largely created and cast as bronze limited editions, the sculptor's private focus of work since the year 2000 has been creating original one-of-a-kind sculptures. These original designs carry forward the artist's earliest intention to evince a plethora of visionary conceptions imagined since the 1970s. Such sculptures are classed as originals alongside M.L. Snowden's scaled installation enlargements. Housed in both public and private domains, M.L. Snowden's original sculptures are known to be cast in bronze along with other mediums including carved marble, Safran Argile Cuite and other advanced ceramic mediums. These sculptures have been appraised as commanding the highest valuations and rarely appear on the secondary art market.

The Glendale Civic Monument: Part of the Geological Coreium, the Glendale California's Civic Monument, also known as the “Shield,” takes its name from the igneous geological formation of a “Shield Protectite.”   The composition has a vertical human icon that holds back chaos in the form a 2-ton abstract bronze mass. The 10-ton, 20-foot monument was installed in Glendale's $56 million civic plaza. The monument has four base-mounted bas-relief bronze portraits of fallen officers who died in the line of duty. The monument was funded with donations from the community and a variety of philanthropic sources including the Walt Disney Corporation. Walt's brother, Roy Disney, supported the monument's Widow's and Orphans Fund Campaign that was also aided by the organized efforts of Marty Sclar.

Albert Gersten Memorial: Her 1981 Albert Gersten Memorial is the focal point of the lobby of the Gersten Pavilion at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Cast in Platinum Rosso Fournier bronze and featuring the sculptor's innovative silk burnishing technique, the central portrait bust of Albert Gersten is encased in a polished travertine setting.

Cataclasis at Hannon Library: The lobby of LMU's Hannon Library includes "Cataclasis Study" evokes three states of energy: The Latent, the Emerging and the Active. The sculptor in concert with contemporary geological science increasingly views planet earth as a living organism, with its rock and soil structures following the same aging patterns as biological human life forms. In this scaled study, planetary energy is conveyed dimensionally where Snowden's Latent icon embodies old age, Active embraces middle age, and the Emerging element equates to youth. Snowden invented the specialized foundry wax that has enabled Cataclasis Study to be cast as a complex lost wax bronze.

Several Snowden works are displayed in hospitals and other healthcare centers, including “Genesis” in the lobby of the Noris Cancer Center at the University of Southern California, Ira Kaufman Founder's Memorial at Centinela Hospital Medical Center;  and the M.L. Snowden Bronze Collection at the Eisenhower Medical Center. Biomed entrepreneur Henri Termeer commissioned Snowden's “Helix X” and “Helix Y” for the corporate headquarters of the genetics research institute Genzyme in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, M.L. Snowden's art joined the HRM Queen Elizabeth II Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace in commemoration of her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee. Biola University Library; Soka University of America and Japan; along with other colleges and universities. The ML Snowden Collection Trust was established in Australia upon the comprehensive Australian acquisition of every example of M.L. Snowden's Geological Coreium.

Moved text ends.

PRRfan (talk) 17:11, 7 November 2023 (UTC)