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Sculptor Ira Sherman: 'going to the places that scare me'
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Sculptor Ira Sherman
Late one summer afternoon in 1979 somebody banged on the door of Ira Sherman's storefront at the corner of Louisiana and Logan. The space, which he called Alva Studios after his boyhood hero Thomas Alva Edison, served as both his apartment and a workshop where he hand-crafted fine jewelry for a living. He’d already closed for the day, but now, peering in through the window was this insistant kid, maybe sixteen, seventeen, wearing a watch cap, long shirt and baggy pants.
'He seemed really nervous,' Sherman recalls, 'deranged even, like he was on drugs or something. I shouted through the window ‘What do you want?’ at which point he raised a very large and deadly looking 357 Magnum and shouted back, ‘Open the door motherf--ker or I’ll blow your head off!’
What Sherman describes as a 'hum or a buzz' came over him. He unlocked the door and the kid stepped through and pointed the gun at his head. 'Open the safe,' he demanded.
'Maybe it was an accident,” Sherman says, 'but as I was bending over the safe, the gun went off and a bullet whizzed past my ear and blew a hole in the floor.'
The thief quickly filled his pockets with the safe’s contents, grabbed the money from the cash drawer and, on his way out, swept Sherman’s keys and some gems off the countertop. Fearing he might return, Sherman did not sleep at the studio for the next ten days.
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Stang Machine at the Louisianna lightrail stop
When he finally summoned the courage to go back, he planted a small white flag in the bullet hole ('My flag of surrender') and spent some time reflecting on the life he had come so close to losing. He was twenty-nine years old and he’d never traveled, never been outside the country.
'I’d seen the movie Midnight Express, and I just assumed that the rest of the world was dangerous and the US was safe. But after the robbery I knew this was a total illusion. How many people do you see getting shot on television every night? It’s part of our culture to just shoot your way through a problem.'
It was time, he decided, to go traveling.
His journeys over the next several years took him to Europe, Israel, India, Nepal, Thailand, Burma, Japan. 'I felt totally at home wherever I went,' he says. 'I was never, ever concerned for my safety.'
Back in the States, he continued making jewelry, but he also found himself drawn to larger and larger projects. He went from earrings and bracelets, to wearable mechanized art, to public sculpture on an architectural scale. One such piece, Stang Machine, a half-ton kinetic neon and stainless steel behemoth, hangs from the ceiling at the lightrail station at Louisiana and Pearl -- just three blocks from the storefront where he was held up.
'I was born trepidatious,' he says. 'But after the robbery I decided the best way to handle my fear was to go to the places that scare me. So I started taking on projects that were way beyond my technical ability. I learned to break them down into small, manageable segments, and I picked up the skills I needed as I went along. Anything I can imagine I can build.'
His work has been shown in the US, Canada, Europe, Israel and Japan. The Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery owns a piece of his art. Both Wired Magazine and Popular Mechanics have done features on him.
'Sometimes I think that without the robbery none of this would have ever happened,' he says with a wry smile. 'I’m still trepidatious. But I’ve learned that it’s how you deal with your fear that makes the difference.'
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