Sculptor Vinnie Bagwell Is A Winner and a BIG deal. She has one of those amazing talents that make your jaw drop. Can you believe she’s an untutored artist? She’s a Who’s Who in America 2022-inductee for sculpting. Vinnie started sculpting in 1993, and was commissioned to create her first public artwork in 1995. Her portraits display immense spirit and verisimilitude, and have souls which speak to their viewers.
Vinnie just won a big competition. The City of Niagara Falls has decided to commission her vision of Harriet Tubman, to be installed in front of the Underground Railroad Museum in Niagara Falls, NY. Public artworks of Harriet Tubman traditionally portray her as an old woman, but she was only 29 when she escaped from slavery and returned to Maryland as an Underground Railroad “conductor” so Vinnie chose to portray her young. A winning vision! Below is a photo of the small version of “Harriet Tubman on the Road to Freedom!” but Vinnie can’t wait to make her BIG! Because BIG is what Vinnie does.
This Spring Vinnie will permanently install “The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden”–an urban-heritage public-art project to commemorate the legacy of the first enslaved Africans to be manumitted by law in the United States, 64 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in Yonkers, NY.
She’s also rehabilitating the second-largest African burial ground in New York: The Sacred Place of Her Ancestors. The National Endowment for the Arts is the first major funder for this still developing project.
Here are some of her other works.
Vinnie Bagwell is a Sculptor, Writer, Graphic Designer, Grant Writer, & Public Speaker. Specialties: Bas-relief and three-dimensional sculpture | Bronze and bronze resin
I invited Vinnie Bagwell to join me because I wanted to know more about how the heck she does all that big stuff she does she does, and thought you might too. Enjoy our podcast conversation.
