James Earle Fraser: Mostly in His Own Words

I was confronted with an annoying sense of responsibility to write / paint, this pseudo-biographical / portrait of the great American sculptor, James Earle Fraser (1876 - 1953). This book is primarily his unfinished autobiography or memoirs that was recovered from the archives at Syracuse University and at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Materials from Fraser’s artistic production and some of the articles written about him and by him, have been added in an attempt to “paint” the picture of a man, an artist, a child of the Dakota prairie, a sculptor of the monumental. How could one possibly say “great” in relation to James Earle Fraser, someone who the New York Times Magazine called, the "Most Famous Unknown Sculptor”? The article was written approximately two years before his death on October 11, 1953. More critically, analytically, and existentially, this tiny book opens a very much larger question – “What is required to be remembered?”