In Studio with Nick Legeros

Banner image: Nick Legeros' Blue Ribbon Bronze studio. All photos by Cory Eull.

 

I met Nick Legeros a couple years back while on a walk in Northeast Minneapolis. I was loitering around his studio’s backyard, intrigued by a giant, Frankensteinian head seen from a distance. He saw me lingering by, and I was invited in without hesitation, offered coffee, and naturally given a tour.

Since that first encounter, there’s been an inclination to revisit. There is a charm to the Blue Ribbon Bronze building and location, like it’s been stuck in time since before Northeast’s high-rise apartments and restaurants took root in the area. With the foundry mere blocks from the historic Grain Belt brewing complex and an out-of-service railroad line just yards away, there’s an industrial sense to its whereabouts. Bronze casting itself being a thousands-year-old process, there is a timelessness inherent to the craft, too. Something about Legeros’ demeanor and practice remind me of trailing behind my dad as he moved swiftly from task to task in his woodshop, or watching as my partner goes from filing wheel spokes into nails to deconstructing a harmonica in a very ADHD-influenced, yet effective fashion.

Legeros bought his workshop in 2003. With the building’s commercial overlay, he knew he’d be able to make as much noise as needed without complaints. He’d end up leveling out the floor and altering the space to accommodate a foundry. Legeros recalls when artists were pushed out of the North Loop in the 1980s and '90s, and the resulting surge of studio spaces being rented for cheap in the vacant mills and warehouses of the Northeast neighborhood — thus birthing the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

“This is a very unique situation,” Legeros said. “If all the florists in Minneapolis were within a one mile square, and there were thousands of them, you wouldn’t think to go anywhere else for flowers. You’d have all of the variety, you’d have the best pricing, you’d have everything. And so, I still think there are a lot of artist zones across the country, and a lot of cities using them for development. Ours developed pretty well already, because as soon as artists move in, you get more restaurants, more galleries, you get what's happened to Northeast. It becomes kind of tony; everyone wants to live here.”

As I toured his studio again, this time with a voice memo rolling on my phone, and this time accepting the coffee that was offered along with a packaged biscotti, Nick welcomed me into his office. As I sat on the armchair getting situated, Nick paused before pulling my espresso shot, saying he had to check the temperature of some wax he was melting in back.

 

Top: A pot of wax in Legeros' studio coming to temperature. Bottom: The artist pours the melted wax into a mold.

 

Legeros moved from thing to thing in the studio, assessing the way he would mount a stainless steel cupola onto the tin roof of the education building at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. And how he would then position a hammered copper rooster and wind vane with a threaded rod atop the cupola, which has to be perfectly balanced in order to work properly, the whole instrument spinning on a single bearing. Legeros has never made a weathervane before, so much of his process has been one of trial-and-error and hands-on research.

“There’s tremendous history to this stuff, and there’s plenty online you can learn about”, said Legeros.

Initially figuring a rooster cast in bronze would be too heavy to catch wind, he made a one-sided version. Modeling it in clay, making a mold of it in plaster, casting it in wax and eventually in bronze, he then took copper and hammered it into the bronze to transfer the shape, finally seaming together two pieces like this. Before deciding to use hammered copper, Legeros called up an illustrious weathervane maker on the East Coast, to learn more about the copper repoussé technique the maker specializes in, where the material is heated, pushed forward from the back, and cooled multiple times over. Eventually the copper is chased, or embossed, with detail from the front. 

 

 

Welding and adjusting the part that would clamp the cupola to the roof, trying to get the fit just right, Nick intermittently took the temperature of the wax that was heating in sauce pans atop a gas stove. Once the wax was to temperature, he began slowly pouring it into a flexible silicone mold of a figure, made from an original wax model. Two or three layers of casting wax were poured into the silicone, which was held secure by a plaster mother mold.

At this point, the cast wax mold is immersed in an “investment material” of plaster, brick dust, and silica flour before loaded into a kiln. “The casting ends up looking kind of rough, like sand, because you have to encase it in a fireproof material that will withstand the heat of the bronze and the burnout process” The molds get baked at 1200 degrees for 24 hours, “to get not only the wax out but all the chemical moisture out, otherwise the bronze going into the mold will explode from the rapid connection to the moisture.” There ends up being a network of vents and arteries, called sprues, attaching the cast to a cup. This gets the bronze flowing in and the air out. Within this sculpture process, there is a dance of filling positive then negative space. A back and forth, a straying from and arriving at an authentic form.

“A lot of people don't get into this because it's too much process, it's not immediate. And they don't want to deal with molds or wax or anything other than modeling clay. And you can do that, you can go to a foundry, and they'll take it and transfer it to bronze. It costs an awful lot to do that, and you don't necessarily get back what you gave to them. Because they're gonna try to reproduce it as best they can, but it's not like an artist that gets to refine things and make it better as you go along. And there are a lot of steps, so that’s one of the reasons why I do it, is I can keep making it better. So what I finish with is way better than what I started with.” 

 

The artist at work in his shop.

 

There were multiple moments where Legeros was either talking to me or himself — I didn’t bother to ask who — as he narrated what he was looking for or what puzzle he was trying to solve. Rummaging through a tool cabinet while mumbling — there’s something comforting about being around someone who’s keeping busy. At one point Legeros turned to me and said, “Maybe this isn’t what you had in mind today,” gesturing to the steps he had traced in the studio at least 10 times by then. He didn’t know, but it’s exactly what I had in mind.

“It’s all problem solving… A job like this is 90% engineering”, said Legeros. He pushes a lot of limits however, even with the systems-based approach. Creativity filters in because of the knowledge and experience acquired working with different materials. That flexibility comes from really knowing what the material is going to do. “Isn’t it fun?” Legeros asked. “All the stuff you don’t know until you know?”

Much of Legeros’ work consists of memorial pieces, some honoring people he knew. “I get asked to do a lot of memorial stuff, and it always adds a different layer to what you do, because you’re not just making a buck, right? You’re kind of immortalizing somebody in a way, and you're helping people with their grief. It can be personal to you, like this is,” Legeros says as he hands me a golf ball marker off his desk, the face of a recently passed friend appearing when I flip the coin over in my hand. “It’s nice to be a part of your world around you, and to have tangible things that connect other people, and that provides a wonderful dimension to just going to work at casting stuff.”

“I don’t think you become known as an artist without interacting with other people… I ended up figuring that out when I was 55. It took me a long time to figure out why I’d been able to have a career when so many artists did not. It's just networking…”

That's why Art-A-Whirl is a success, Legeros notes, because it forces artists’ doors open and the people stream in. Even if artists would prefer to hermit in their studios, many have come to depend on the annual open studio tour economically. Legeros’ foundry is unique from most studio buildings in Northeast, but it still operates within the buzz of Art-A-Whirl, because for him it’s about the in-person interactions. His doors will be open, and he might just invite you in for a coffee, give your dog a treat, and let you linger while he breaks open a plaster mold or cuts sprues off a freshly cast bronze.◼︎ 

 

Nick Legeros.

Nick Legeros' Blue Ribbon Bronze studio is located at 84 14th Ave NE. You can find Legeros' works in many spots around the Twin Cities, including the Goldy the Gopher statue outside Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. Follow the artist on Instagram @nikosculpture.