“A Spell of the Sensuous,” a 2001 sculpture by Nicholas Legeros in stainless steel and bronze.
Fall art exhibit, ‘Recipes in Bronze, Sculpture of Nicholas Legeros,’ opens Sept. 18
Twelve works by an Edina sculptor will be featured in a fall exhibition, “Recipes in Bronze: Sculpture of Nicholas Legeros,” at the University of St. Thomas.
Free and open to the public, “Recipes in Bronze” will run from Monday, Sept. 18, through Friday, Oct. 27, in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus. The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and noon to 10 p.m. Sundays.
The public is welcome to attend a free reception for the artist from 4 to 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, at the gallery. Guests also are welcome to visit six other local college and university art exhibits that evening during “Art Attack: A Multi-Campus Gallery Crawl.” St. Thomas and six other institutions – Augsburg College, Bethel University, the College of St. Catherine, the College of Visual Arts, Concordia University and Macalester College – host the event. Free shuttle buses will take visitors from gallery to gallery, where they’ll enjoy refreshments and music along with exhibitions.
About the artist: Legeros, 51, is a well known Minnesota sculptor who is a practitioner of the ancient method of lost-wax (“cire-perdu”) bronze casting.
The centuries-old process of lost-wax metal casting starts with a model sculpted in wax. The wax is then enclosed in clay and the wax is melted out, making a hollow mold. The mold is then filled with molten metal. After the work cools, the sculptor breaks the mold, removes the plaster core, and files or polishes the metal product.
Legeros studied the method as an assistant of the late Paul Granlund at Gustavus Adolphus College, from which Legeros received his bachelor’s degree in studio arts in 1977.
He did graduate work in sculpture at the University of Iowa before earning a master of fine arts in sculpture from the University of Minnesota in 1983. President of the Society of Minnesota Sculptors from 1988 to 1995, Legeros has taught at the Edina Art Center, Metropolitan State University and the Breck Schools. He also was an artist-in-residence at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts for nearly 11 years. This year he is vice president of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association, a nonprofit organization instrumental in establishing the area as an arts district.
Legeros has been commissioned to create works for a variety of public and corporate spaces, including Eden Prairie-based Lifetouch Inc., Hudson (Wis.) Hospital, Ridgeview Medical Center in Waconia, Minneapolis-based M.A. Mortenson & Co. and more. One of Legeros’ latest works is a statue of the late Monsignor Terrence Murphy, president of St. Thomas from 1966 to 1991. That piece now adorns the southwest corner of Summit and Cleveland avenues, welcoming students to a new St. Thomas business education building, McNeely Hall, which opens in September.
For more information: For more information about this or other exhibits at St. Thomas, contact the university’s Art History Department, (651) 962-5560.
