Sculpting Their New Futures : Art: Former gang members get on-the-job training working with artist Robert Graham.

A new item at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s gift shop appears to be the work of Robert Graham. The 11-inch-tall bronze, composed of a nude female torso on a textured cylinder, exemplifies the elegant form and technical perfection that characterize the renowned Los Angeles artist’s sculpture.

Indeed, the limited-production bronze is a Graham, but it’s also the work of seven former Los Angeles gang members who had never seen the inside of a famous artist’s studio until a few months ago. The young men--ranging in age from 19 to 35--are engaged in a collaborative project that provides them with employment and training while producing artworks for the benefit of the museum. Proceeds from sales of the sculptures, priced at $250 apiece, will fund First Visit and Beyond, the museum’s community outreach program.

“This is a way for us to reach beyond the museum’s four walls and try to provide creative solutions to problems in the community,” museum director Richard Koshalek said. The sculpture is part of an ongoing series of “multiples,” or limited-production artists’ works, commissioned by the museum, but Graham’s work is the first to be conceived as a product of community involvement. Providing an aesthetic experience, training and employment for the former gang members engages Graham and the museum in efforts to rebuild Los Angeles following the riots that occurred after the verdicts of the Rodney G. King beating case, Koshalek said.

“This kind of project is at the center of what we do,” said Barry Sanders, co-chair of Rebuild L.A., at a Monday press conference announcing the collaboration. “It didn’t require a law or a government grant or a charitable contribution. This is one man doing what he does best and making a difference in people’s lives.”

“It’s about passing things down,” Graham said of the project. “Those of us who have something to do in life, as opposed to just having a job, have a responsibility to pass things down.” The seven young men who produce the sculptures perform the exacting process of lost-wax casting in a studio Graham set up for them in Venice. They have had to learn complicated production techniques, but they are not simply training for foundry jobs, Graham said. “They are apprentice artists. I’m passing down my responsibility as an artist, and they have accepted this,” he said.

The project began early this year when the museum asked Graham to create an artwork for its limited-production series. After the city had been devastated by civil unrest, he decided to make the commission a collaborative, truly public project. The plan that developed was a response to the riots, but also to Los Angeles’ widespread social and economic ills and to “the excesses of the 1980s,” Graham said. Searching for a way to connect his work with the needs of the community, he consulted with actor and civic activist Edward James Olmos, who put him in touch with Steven Valdivia, director of Community Youth Gang Services, a nonprofit organization that helps find employment for former gang members.

Graham had chosen the subject of the MOCA sculpture--a torso of his bronze “Source Figure,” a 40-inch nude atop a 10-foot column, at the First Interstate Bank World Center downtown. “It had to be the best I can do. It couldn’t be just a second thought,” he said of the museum commission. In preparation for the collaboration, the artist made a master of the torso, which would be turned into a series of original reproductions by lost-wax casting.

The next task was to find young men who could learn to produce the sculptures. “I interviewed a lot of people. It was a stroke of luck that the original seven have continued,” Graham said. The apprentices he chose had various kinds of art experience, but that wasn’t what concerned the sculptor. Graham was looking for people who grasp the spirit of art. “They have to understand what a work of art is, what it means to make a work of art, that it involves a certain kind of magic,” he said. “I wanted to see how they responded to the piece, how they felt about it, if they could work with it. I was looking for a spirit of experiment.”

In addition, Graham asked candidates to fashion a ball from a lump of clay so that he could observe their dexterity. “They had to be able to do the work, not just want to do it,” he said.

The men said that initially they didn’t know what to make of Graham’s proposal. “I thought we were going to pose for him,” Robin Barreno joked.

“I didn’t know if he would have the patience to work with us,” John Cota said.

But their reservations appear to have vanished, as they go about their newfound tasks in the workshop that Graham has set up for them adjacent to his own studio in Venice.

Rey Anthony Oropeza and Juan Carlos Munoz pour wax into rubber molds made from the production master. Upstairs, Barreno, Cota and Agustin Gonzalez sit around a table, painstakingly repairing seams, holes, bubbles and other imperfections in wax figures that have been removed from the rubber molds. In another room, equipped with vats of liquid ceramic and bins of sand, Mario Garcia and James Dilworth coat the wax figures with consecutive layers of the liquid and increasingly coarse sand. Using a brush to fill in gaps and blowing on bubbles that settle on the surface, Dilworth explains that the sculpture will be destroyed if the coating isn’t perfect.

“Anyone can ruin the piece along the way. What you did three weeks ago can come back to haunt you. It’s a responsibility that we’re all assuming,” Graham said.

After the shell is hard, the coated wax figure is placed in an autoclave and the wax is melted out by high-pressure steam. Molten metal is then poured into the cavity where the wax was. When the outer shell is broken away from the cooled metal, imperfections are repaired, the bronze is cleaned by sandblasting and a patina is applied.

“The nature of the lost-wax process is that there is no original in the popular sense,” Graham said. Each piece is slightly different from the others, depending upon what the artist brings to it, he said.

As the project continues, the apprentices will rotate their tasks. “We had a high failure rate at first, but we hope to produce 100 pieces a week,” Graham said. Unlike numbered, limited-edition artworks produced by other processes, there is no set number that can be made by lost-wax casting. “Hopefully it will have a long run,” he said.