He would be new, he would be bronze, and he would live inside.
In the coming weeks St. Albert city councillors will be asked to draw $30,000 from a public art reserve fund to replace the statue of Saint Albert that was stolen from its outdoor location in Founder’s Court in 2023.
Naught but an empty base and widespread outrage remained.
Emily Baker, chair of the Arts Development Advisory committee and curator at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, said Friday Saint Albert’s disappearance left a hole in more than a block of concrete.
“It was really hard,” she said. “People, especially with (the) public art community, developed a strong relationship to the piece and everybody really loved that statue. I've heard him referred to as that curious Boy or Peter Pan that everyone had a really sort of loving connection to him.”
The new statue may find its home inside St. Albert Place, which would be an appropriate location give Saint Albert's affiliation with lifelong learning, Coun. Shelley Biermanski said Friday.
"It will be nice to have some of the initial view, focus and creativity from the artist" in the new piece, she said.
She added that the statue would be slightly smaller than its ancestor, in order to manage the cost. Saint Albert had insurance, but the policy's payout won't cover the entire cost of the new art.
The value of bronze is behind the disappearances of statues, plaques and other monuments around the world.
Horse-themed works vanished from galleries in Vancouver in 2019 and 2023, nearly 500 pounds of metal between them. Earlier this year, a bronze monument of civil rights luminary Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was removed from its base in Denver, Colorado and found in a scrap yard.
(Not that looting bronze works of art is anything new to the Commonwealth).
“Bronze is becoming more difficult to keep outside, which is sort of a global problem in public art at the moment,” Baker explained. “A lot of bronze is going missing and being stolen, likely to be melted down and sold for its material parts, which is really tragic. The sentimental value and importance to the community for all of those works is so much greater than the material value would be to melt it down.”
Saint Albert 2.0 will be new in almost every sense of the word. Since sculptor Al Henderson didn’t keep the moulds (not many artists hang on to used quarter-century old moulds), sculptor Al Henderson will be creating a new work from scratch.
“It was really important to the committee and to a lot of the community members to be able to bring some version of the sculpture back again and working with the same artist,” Baker said. “So, it won’t be exactly the same, but it will have the same emotional feel. It was a sculpture that was meant to be sort of celebrating that joyful curiosity that children have, that wonder for the natural world inspiring, lifelong learning. You sort of had this wonderful gentleness about him that everyone just really enjoyed.”
That’s our boy
Unveiled Nov. 29, 2001, the four-foot-tall, 150-pound bronze statue depicted a 15-year-old boy dressed in a 12th century tunic holding an injured bird, intended to portray Albertus Magnus (AKA Saint Albert the Great, the patron saint of scientists) as a young man.
It was commissioned from Henderson by the St. Albert 2000 Steering Committee, Profiles Visual Arts Society and the St. Albert Continuous Learning Society in 2001.
St. Albert is named after the patron saint of its founder, Father Albert Lacombe. When commissioned to craft this statue, Henderson was one of many city residents who believed Lacombe’s patron saint to be Saint Albert the Great — the result of an erroneous entry in the city’s official history book, The Black Robe’s Vision. Official documents found by church archivists suggest that Lacombe’s patron saint, and this city’s namesake, was almost certainly Saint Albert of Louvain, a cardinal assassinated during a political dispute in 1192.
St. Albert has collected more than 300 unique pieces of public art since the city started amassing them in the 1970s.
The pieces, largely on display in civic buildings and spaces, are paintings, pottery pieces, sculptures and fibre arts installations.