‘Babe’s Dream’ creator carving out historic moments of time

Once, she brought the young Babe Ruth back to his old neighborhood.

Once, she gave us a Cal Ripken for the ages.

Now, for the city of Cumberland, she’s turning a guy who played Prince Charming for Disney on Ice into the father of our country.

“Pretty nice,” says Luery, chuckling across the telephone from her new home, near Cape Cod, to a listener in her old hometown of Baltimore.

“Nothing like showing up for work every day, and Prince Charming’s waiting for you.”

By the time she’s finished, the former ice-skating prince – also known as model Jeremy Cord – will be transformed into an 8.5-foot bronze statue of the young Lt. Col. George Washington, to be displayed in the city of Cumberland’s historic district.

“This piece really belongs in Cumberland,” says Luery. “It will add tremendously to the story of the city’s heritage. People aren’t aware of the impact he had on Cumberland, and how much impact Cumberland had on Washington.”

The young Washington arrived in Allegheny County’s Fort Cumberland as an aide to Gen. Braddock and, in 1755, was appointed commander of the Virginia Regiment stationed at the fort following Braddock’s death.

But Washington’s headquarters, a one-room cabin in Riverside Park, near the Potomac River, is the only remaining structure from Fort Cumberland, and one of the few visible reminders of Washington’s time there.

For Luery, the effort’s been “an absolute joy,” and the latest step in a remarkable career.

A graduate of Baltimore’s Northwestern High School and the Maryland Institute College of Art, she studied sculpture in Italy and “fell in love with it. I’d go to Italy for three or four months at a time, come back to America, get a commission, and use the money I made to go back to Italy and study some more. I did that for years.”

She did “The Dawn of Consciousness” in Baltimore.

She did “The Mayor’s Garden,” acquired by New York City’s Cloisters Museum. And she did “The Passage” at the Towson Courthouse.

Then she moved back to Italy to study with master sculptor Alberto Sparapani.

From there, she created such striking pieces as “Promethean Radiation” in 1981. It was acquired by Prince Charles and Princess Diana, making Luery the youngest American artist represented in the Royal Collection in Great Britain.

Her work is among the collections at such disparate places as the Naples Philharmonic Art & Cultural Center and The National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Baltimoreans know her best as the creator of “Babe’s Dream,” the statue at Oriole Park that captures the young Babe of West Baltimore as he’s about to break into organized baseball, and the Cal Ripken statue she did for Aberdeen’s Cal Ripken Museum.

“When I did Babe Ruth,” Luery says, “I read a lot about his life. I asked myself, ‘What would it feel like to be this young fellow coming of age?’ When I did Cal, they told me what they wanted – Cal saluting the crowd. He was known for that, for caring about the fans.”

For the George Washington piece, she had to reach across the ages.

“The people from Cumberland called me about two years ago,” she says. “We had a few meetings where we talked about concepts. While they raised the money, I did a lot of reading about Washington’s life as a young man. He had an incredible journey and, in a way, my concept of him has been enhanced by where I live now. A lot of the houses here were built before 1750. I’m submerged in this atmosphere.”

She also contacted historian Joseph Ellis, who wrote the 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation.”

“He shared his thoughts about Washington,” Luery says. “The ambition, the ferocity that he would have had to have accomplished what he did. How incredibly courageous and bold. I see him leaping over logs in that wild frontier. He had to do so many things just to survive.”

When she needed somebody to pose as Washington, she consulted with a forensic scientist about Washington’s looks, and then ran a newspaper ad for a model.

In walked the ice skating Prince Charming, Jeremy Cord, “a ringer,” says Luery. “Kind of amazing.”

Last week Luery finished a 21-inch scale model of the statue.

In August, she’ll begin work on the big version.

She’s hoping the piece can be unveiled next spring.

“From what I’ve seen,” she said, “Cumberland looks like it’s going through a real resurgence. I hope this can be a part of it.”

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com