Category: Public Art

Medal of Honor Memorial

The memorial is designed to be the symbolic heart of a busy campus.  Its position on Memorial Way is significant not only for its placement alongside the University’s memorials to students and faculty lost in WWI and WWII, but because it creates a sheltering island amidst the sometimes cacophonous and often contradictory pulls of campus life. 

It is designed to allow someone to take a moment’s pause amidst the flurry to recognize and confront the tough decisions in life; and find inspiration and affirmation to do what must be done.

MOH1 (2)

I am a representational artist.  My work is to create objects and spaces that faithfully depict the subject at hand; to capture and convey these short pivotal moments that have changed so much; to remember and hold them up for the rest of us to regard.

HDRpano

This memorial captures and honors the actions performed by these men, whose actions represent the questions and challenges we all will face at some time in our lives.  These moments of extreme challenge when our lives, our futures, and the very fate of our cause lay in the balance.  These moments are etched in our hearts. They are the stories we hope to pass to our children and the ages in bronze, in glass, and in stone.

MOH2 (2)

I hope this memorial is a sanctuary, inviting people to come in and pause and be inspired by the example of these individuals and gather the courage and resolve to be in touch with something greater than oneself.

MOHbookstone

BookstoneMinerva

 

 

UW Nobel Laureate Wall

In 2007 the University of Washington dedicated an honor wall in recognition of outstanding faculty achievement.  Magrath Sculpture was commissioned to make bas relief portraits of the six faculty members who had won the Nobel Prize. As this project was on a very tight deadline, I called in Heidi Wastweet, of Wastweet Studios  and we split the portraits in order complete this on time.  Woodwork and general contracting by William Walker Woodworking.    The project was designed by Mithun Architecture
Special thanks also to Steve Anderson and Vicking Fire Foundry for their herioc efforts in casting this project. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lot’s Tribe

With heightened airport security due to potential terrorist threats, continued and increasing war in the Middle East, and (at the time of the installation) five years passage since Sept 11th, Seattle artist Michael Magrath created a series of site-specific sculptures intended to ask stark questions about the roots of terror.

Lot’s Tribe is conceived as a temporary memorial to the other victims of 9 /11: Three life-sized statues of Iraqi civilian men and boys, each cast in salt, were placed in Occidental Park, in Pioneer Square, Downtown Seattle for the morning of September 11, 2006. There the white, crystalline figures stood, sudden incursions of unwelcome reality into our daily lives, until the rains came and they dissolved away.

“These figures were culled from news images coming out of the Middle East over the past few years,” says Magrath. “The scenes were shocking, and I wondered why they were not more widely seen. They made me think about what it feels like to witness something so unexpected and vast; like an explosion that will permanently alter your life, and how that sort of traumatic event evolves over time. My intent was to render some sense of these scenes in as real and arresting manner as possible, a kind of 3D photojournalism — silent monuments to seemingly distant events with which we, whether we recognize it or not, are intimately connected.”

Read more in the article This Memorial Destined for Oblivion, Seattle P.I., September 10, 2006

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Lot’s Tribe: the boy

With heightened airport security due to potential terrorist threats, continued and increasing war in the Middle East, and (at the time of the installation) five years passage since Sept 11th, Seattle artist Michael Magrath created a series of site-specific sculptures intended to ask stark questions about the roots of terror.

Lot’s Tribe is conceived as a temporary memorial to the other victims of 9 /11: Three life-sized statues of Iraqi civilian men and boys, each cast in salt, were placed in Occidental Park, in Pioneer Square, Downtown Seattle for the morning of September 11, 2006. There the white, crystalline figures stood, sudden incursions of unwelcome reality into our daily lives, until the rains came and they dissolved away.

“These figures were culled from news images coming out of the Middle East over the past few years,” says Magrath. “The scenes were shocking, and I wondered why they were not more widely seen. They made me think about what it feels like to witness something so unexpected and vast; like an explosion that will permanently alter your life, and how that sort of traumatic event evolves over time. My intent was to render some sense of these scenes in as real and arresting manner as possible, a kind of 3D photojournalism — silent monuments to seemingly distant events with which we, whether we recognize it or not, are intimately connected.”

Read more in the article This Memorial Destined for Oblivion, Seattle P.I., September 10, 2006

 

LT_boy