You know that statue? I built it.

I am Billy. I’m with my mom.

 

Now I’m the tall one. And that’s Saint Margaret’s Church. And those are my brothers and sisters. Three more of us aren’t even born yet. There will be seven of us.

We live here. That’s 41 Carey Avenue at the top of a big hill with lots of woods. There are no other houses way up here. We play cowboys and Indians, and we climb the trees. Dad has a telescope. We look at the sky. He works in rockets and space. We have a microscope too.

I walk all the way to this school.

I pass by this farm.

Now I’m older. I’m in Burlington High School. I use the Seminatore’s pond for my biology projects. I study the wildlife in there, even the tiniest living things. I use my microscope to see them. But I’m really an artist. I like making sculptures. Those are my favorites.

My favorite teacher is Mrs. Marvin. She brings out my best ideas. She makes me think and try. She makes me a better person.

Now I’ve graduated high school! I’m a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but I’m taking some time to build a sculpture for Burlington. The school system is paying me to do this one. It was Mrs. Marvin’s idea. It’s only $350, and that barely pays for the materials. But it’s still a big deal. It’s a gesture of gratitude toward Mrs. Marvin for my inspiring art education. Here I am, building the statue in a room behind the high school stage.

I will call it “A Tribute to Youth.” It will be a statue of me. Well, not really me. It will represent me in high school. It’s a young man about to graduate and go into the world. He has a book, so he knows some things, but does he know enough? Does he know the right things? He’s going through a stressful time at home. Mom died from cancer during his junior year, so Dad is taking care of seven kids by himself. It’s hard. The boy aspires to become a professional artist but is struggling with this huge loss in his life. He’s sitting at the front door of the school, looking out at the world. He’s excited, but he’s also a little scared. Maybe this is every kid when they leave high school. Maybe this is everybody at every transition in life.

Okay, now it’s almost done.

Okay, now we have to move it to the right place, outside the front door.

 

And so my statue, my first statue, went up 50 years ago, fall of 1976. It’s still there, except it’s been moved instead of outside.

 

Now that boy is all grown up. And now I have the answers to those big questions looming over that statue’s head. Those questions about the future. What would become of me? What would I mold myself into?

 

I molded myself into a professional sculptor. Now people come to me when they need really important sculptures in really important places. So do businesses when they need to make a statement. So do schools. So do governments.

 

Meet the Clinton 12, the first black students to cross the “color barrier” in the South after the Supreme Court banned racial segregation in public schools in 1954. This was a huge moment in US history. These brave high school students were subjected to horrendous bullying. Here’s a famous photo of the Clinton 12.

I was proud to bring that image into the three-dimensional world, to make those people REAL:

Yes, this is my work.

 

Meet the Pennsylvania Worker, who represents the worth ethic of the Philadelphia labor unions.

 

Meet two students at the Nathan A. Pitts Ashburton Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore. When people learn, they become worldly. Get it?

 

Meet Paul Gordon of Gordon Food Service in Michigan. He was a religious billionaire, so of course he’s reading the Bible.

 

Meet Pegasus. This is at the Calvert School in Maryland, to honor a girl who died suddenly.

 

Sometimes people call me when they need something fun. Here are some kids doing what I used to do in Burlington. They’re skating on a pond and hoping they don’t fall in. This is at the entrance to The Gardens Ice House skating complex in Maryland.

 

Sometimes people want something fanciful. A wealthy lawyer in Pennsylvania hired me to do this one.

 

Some creative tools were unheard of when I began. I created this one with computerized artificial intelligence and brought it into the world on a 3D printer. I’ve studied human anatomy at Harvard Medical School and taught figure sculpting at Towson University using actual human models in the classroom. This is just a new way to render anatomy.

 

But I don’t stop at human anatomy. I’m fascinated with the anatomy of everything. In recent years I’ve closely studied the connections between math, nature and sculpture. Here are my thoughts:

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In the early 1990s, my art took on new shapes, literally and figuratively, when I was exposed to computers. My wife, Farifteh, was working on her PhD at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health at the time. I saw the potential of computers and computational graphics to further the natural progression of my art. I began creating sculptures based on digital data generated through mathematica, CAD-CAM and ultimately fabricated through rapid prototyping and 3D scanning techniques. I knew, before the term “AI” was in the common vocabulary, that it would affect the arts and sciences and bridge the imminent field of 3D data visualization. Anything that can be assigned a metric, any sort of measurement at all, can then be visualized and physically rendered with the help of computers.

This sculpture refers to the Calabi-yau manifold. That’s all part of string theory, which says the universe has 10 or 11 dimensions, but we’re aware of only four. Dive in if you dare.

This all started at Burlington High School. I got a better eduction there than many of the colleges I attended later. I’m so thankful to BHS, I did a workshop with students in Mrs. Chang’s class in 2013.

 

And I made frequent visits to Mrs. Marvin at her retirement home in Ogunquit, Maine. I helped her until she died at 100 years old. And guess what was hanging on her walls the whole time? Art from Burlington High School students.

 

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After graduating from high school in 1971, Bill Duffy graduated the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and got his MFA from University of Maryland at College Park in 1983. Over the course of his career, he has mastered all phases of design, fabrication, and installation of his large-scale public art projects.