Kaldric Dow saw something during a middle school visit to a Houston museum that stopped him in his tracks and helped shape the path he later forged as an artist.
“I saw a lot of amazing things, but it was a lot of Eurocentric things,” Dow, 31, recalled. “Then, when we were leaving, I saw this huge painting of this African American man, just by himself, but the way he dressed reminded me of myself and my family. It was massive, and I felt represented in that place, even though it wasn’t of me or anyone I knew.
“I wouldn’t say that I went home and started painting immediately, because it took years for me to start painting, but that idea stuck with me for years and years. That’s why I do portraits of African Americans now.”
That desire to give others the same powerful sense of seeing themselves in a work of art also informed Dow’s first three-dimensional piece. “Spheres of Reflection,” a dramatic sculpture that was installed in Martin Luther King Park in December as part of the city’s public art program, is rooted in portraiture.
The 16.5-foot-tall steel artwork features a brown face topped by a tower of dark reflective spheres intended to suggest hair. Each sphere bears a single word — gratitude, devote, change, dream and sincerity — that Martin Luther King Jr. often used in his writing.
“The whole idea for that was kind of merging Martin Luther King’s ideology with the design I created,” Dow said. “I understood that he was about self-reflection, looking within yourself for change.”
He wanted the spheres to be both literally and figuratively reflective for those who look at them.
“In the spheres, they’re looking at themselves and their surroundings, but they’re also seeing text like ‘dream’ or ‘bold’ or ‘unity,’ and then they can reflect on their own lives, how they can connect this word with their own life,” he said.
The placement of the piece also might have an impact, he said.
“That’s right outside a Boys & Girls Club and the MLK Academy, so if I can inspire children to see what I saw at that age, I think it will create a lot of artists or people who think about representation,” he said.
Dow had not been actively seeking to move into three-dimensional work, but when the city’s Department of Arts & Culture invited him to design a piece for the East Side park and offered to guide him through the process, he was excited by the possibilities.
“They helped me immensely build this because they had to contact the engineers to work with, then the fabricators to actually build it,” he said.
Community feedback was a big part of the process from the start, said Krystal Jones, interim executive director of the department. That included asking people what they wanted from the artwork.
“People said they really wanted to see something that connects to San Antonio’s history, to the history of civil rights, the history of the East Side, something that really pays homage to African American culture,” Jones said.
She said she has long admired Dow’s portraits and is impressed by “Spheres of Reflection.”
“I really love that he brings in his contemporary style, and makes you think about the topics he’s discussing through the piece in new ways,” she said.
Dow would like to do more public art in the future..
“It feels great to be able to switch as an artist between different mediums, from 2-D to 3-D,” he said. “As artists, we want to diversify how we create, and I think the city offering this program, they make it easier for 2-D artists to create in 3-D, which is extremely challenging by yourself as an artist for the first time.
“But I definitely want to do more.”
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