President Linda Bennett fears USI will earn a ‘party school’ reputation after the year it’s had.

But as months of parties, jamborees and alumni events honoring the university’s golden anniversary begin to wind down, a crowd gathered in the Ruth M. Kleymeyer Hall of Presidents Thursday for one more celebration.

Richard Hunt, an internationally-celebrated sculptor, was honored at a Meet the Artist reception before the dedication of his latest work —commemorating the university’s 50th anniversary—took place outside.

There was one thing he had to clarify first: his towering piece of structured and twisted stainless steel isn’t a statue. It’s a sculpture.

“‘Statue’ is an older term,” he said. “It generally refers to sculptures of people or things, and my work tends to be sort of about developing compositions in the third dimension, which I think I would more appropriately call, ‘sculptures.’”

His piece, titled “From Our Past Toward Our Future,” recognizes the fact that it is a commemoration of the university’s 50th anniversary and aims to tell the story of its history, he said.

“My thought, in terms of both the composition and the place it was going to be, was to create elements that you might call, ‘foundational,’” he said. “Like a large, round, concrete base, and the geometric trapezoidal base that’s part of the sculpture but from where the rest of the sculpture rises from.”

As the sculpture rises, it becomes more elaborate and animated, with references to waves “relating to the importance of rivers” to the Evansville community. The “stepped elements that have to do with rising and expanding” and is topped by the symbolism of ascension and expansion “represented by wings and general movements that tend upwards,” he said.

Hunt was given free rein over the design of the sculpture by the university’s Art Collection Committee. To get inspired, he toured the campus and met with the Committee, department heads, administrators and art professor Kathryn Waters to discus what the anniversary means to the university and its future.

But Hunt was already familiar with USI and its history thanks to former Professor of Ceramics Lenny Dowhie —his friend of 30 years.

“He understood the history via me, as friends talking about it over the years, and he kind of worked that in,” Dowhie said. “Hence where the title came from, ‘From Our Past Towards Our Future,’ because we’ve got 50 years of blood, sweat and guts to get (the university) here.”

It was Dowhie who suggested Hunt for the project to the Committee. “I was in a Committee meeting and they said that they were needing a sculptor and they were thinking about who (to hire),” he said. “I said, ‘Oh, well I know a guy. He’s one of the most prominent sculptors—and certainly the most prominent African American sculptors of the 20th century—and he and I just happen to be friends.”

Dowhie asked the Committee if they would be interested.

“They said, ‘Sure,’ and I sent them to his website so they could see the kind of work he did and get a rough idea,” he said. “They were excited and said, ‘Let’s bring him in.’”

A few months later, Hunt sent the Committee models and ideas of the direction he wanted to go in and they said, “We’ll do it,” Dowhie said.

“They were all afraid to ask how much, so I just asked him and it was within their budget,” Dowhie said. “In fact, I think it’s really cheap —very inexpensive for his work. If you look at his resume, he’s in the Museum of Modern Art, the MET—pretty much every major museum in world.”

From conception to execution, the project to Hunt six months to complete and was created in his Chicago studio. Standing 14 feet tall and weighing 2,000 pounds, the sculpture was loaded horizontally on to a flatbed truck and arrived in Evansville on Tuesday, when it was placed on a two-foot pedestal between Rice Library and the Technology Center.

“It was interesting,” Dowhie said. “(Tuesday) we looked at it when it came in and Nancy Mendez had her art class out there sort of evaluating it. We snuck up and didn’t let them know who he was so he could hear what the students had to say—and they had interesting interpretations —and of course I introduced him to the class so they could all go, ‘What?’ But we like to do stuff like that.”