Before anything else: the sculpture proposed for this site already exists. It is a completed ten-foot original bronze, cast and finished, and it has stood on an engineered foundation in my sculpture garden in Parker County for three years — through wind, rain and hail, without movement or damage. It is roughly an hour from the shelter, and any member of the Committee is welcome to come and stand next to it. You would be selecting a work you have seen and touched at full scale, with a service record behind it, rather than approving a rendering and hoping the finished object matches it.

A public sculpture is two projects at once. One is the artwork. The other is a construction project on City property that must be engineered, permitted, insured, inspected, built on schedule and maintained for decades. Most artists are strong at the first and dependent on others for the second. I have spent forty years doing both.

I have been making sculpture for fifty years. I did graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977–78, where I was awarded a Teaching Assistantship, and my work has been shown in juried and invitational exhibitions continuously since — among them the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, the Korean Ceramics Biennial, the Ceramics Monthly International Competition, and a Seven State Biennial juried by James Surls. I work in clay, and enlarge and cast into bronze and aluminum at monumental scale.

I am also a Certified Master Builder. I have been building since 1985 and developing in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex since 1997. That work is the reason this proposal carries a sealed structural engineering line, a real foundation detail, a named transportation carrier, an insurance line at City-required limits, a maintenance plan written to a service interval rather than a sentiment, and a schedule built backward from cure times and foundry lead times rather than forward from hope. I have worked with municipal plan review, ADA compliance, SWPPP, subcontractor procurement and inspection sequencing for four decades. On this project those are not services I have to buy. They are what I do.

The team is local and it is the team that made the piece. Jimmy Hill, principal of Hefestus Fine Arts in Springtown, cast this sculpture in bronze and will refinish, rig, transport, set and anchor it, and is available to the City for the long-term conservation of the bronze afterward. Hefestus is a full-service lost wax foundry specializing in life size, monument and heroic size work, and it brings five delivered projects at $250,000 or more. Bill Graham, P.E., an engineer I have worked with for forty years, designs and seals the pad, the piers and the anchorage connection. Every principal on this project can be at the site the same day.

Because the work is complete, the schedule is roughly five months rather than a year, and the largest category of risk in any public art commission — that the fabricated object disappoints, arrives late, or costs more than estimated — is simply absent. What remains is engineering, a foundation, a crane and a landscape apron. That is ordinary construction, and it is what I have done for forty years.

The Committee is taking a risk on whoever it selects. I would ask you to weigh where the risk in a public sculpture actually sits — not in the concept, which you will approve before anything is fabricated, but in whether the object gets engineered correctly, delivered on time, anchored properly and cared for afterward. That is the part of this project I can answer for personally.

This response addresses each of the nine items required under Attribute 4 in order, and is accompanied by the detailed budget, the sample invoice required under Attribute 5, and the signed Conflict of Interest Questionnaire.

Respectfully,