Trash to Treasure
WORDS BY Sheri Bell-Rehwoldt
You may think a discarded license plate or an old bicycle chain is just junk. But to sculptor Leo Sewell, it’s the start of a dog or a dinosaur.
See Leo Sewell collections at:
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Intl Airport, Atlanta, GA American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, MD Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia, PA Express-ways Children’s Museum, Chicago, IL The Children’s Museum of Memphis, TN The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, IN Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, FL NBC Corporate Headquarters, New York City, NY Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museums in 23 cities worldwide To view Leo Sewell’s work online, see www.leo.sewell.net
If you ask Edward Meyer (the guy who buys art for the 28 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museums around the globe) why Ripley’s has commissioned 40 life-size, whimsical sculptures of people and animals from Leo Sewell over the last 28 years, you’ll discover it’s because the successful Philly found-object artist is a “carny’s dream.” “His pieces get people through the door,” says Meyer. “People like them, plain and simple.”
In the Ripley’s in Ocean City, Maryland, for example, the draw is Sewell’s statue of a fiddler. In Key West, Florida, it’s a paratrooper falling from the sky. And in Grand Prairie, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, it’s a family trio.
“Frankly, what we like about Leo’s art is that everybody responds to it,” adds Meyer. “That he can make stuff out of scraps of metal and broken toys is cool.”
Sewell, an avowed junk collector since the age of 11, is a technical master of “re-using” other people’s discards. But ask him what he does for a living, and he’ll reply that he’s just “into playing with junk.”
As an “imprinted picker,” Sewell is unable to stop himself from rooting through other people’s trash. But many items now arrive, unsolicited, on the doorstep of his rowhouse studio.
Whereas you and I would steam at these “gifts” of boxed and bagged trash, Sewell is as happy to see them as The Donald is to make a buck. For Sewell, life just doesn’t get more perfect than when he’s fingering, inventorying and shaping the objects into his signature pieces of art—from political pins, medals and buttons to costume jewelry, appliance parts and toy figurines.
Frank Miele, owner of Frank J Miele Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City, asserts that it’s impossible for people to pass Sewell’s pieces without stopping to gawk. “Leo’s stuff is fascinating,” he says. “The objects he uses are always interesting, often amusing. For instance, I’ve got a dog here that Leo made. Dogs are supposed to be man’s best friend, right? On the back of the dog is part of a Pennsylvania license plate that says ‘You’ve got a friend.’”
Similar puns can be found in Sewell’s pieces in the collections of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and The Children’s Museum of Memphis. If you’re fl ying into Georgia’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport during 2006, you can see five of his works on Concourse T, as part of a larger exhibit. On permanent display, near the parking deck exit, are three of Sewell’s 12-foot welded sculptures—two suitcases and a penguin—fashioned from pots and pans, car trim and vacuum cleaner parts, road signs and license plates.
Obviously, part of Sewell’s appeal is that his art is so easy to “get.” But it also plucks at the heartstrings of memory. As Hanley Bodek, Sewell’s neighbor of 18 years, watched his sons, Blair, 12, and Harry, 14, toss out childhood items—signed baseballs, swimming trophies, model cars, hockey pucks, bike parts and yoyos—he scooped them up and stored them with the one guy he knew could fashion them into permanent reminders—time capsules—of his sons’ early years. “Leo’s sculptures,” explains Bodek, “give people the chance to have art that chronicles their lives.” Sewell grins at the comment.
Then he sums up what he thinks his art is all about: “The main thing is that I don’t try to be profound. I just try to make people smile.”