Friday, June 21, 2019
By Brian Foley, Web Content Specialist
The Vanguard Sculpture Services art foundry is tucked into a hidden side street on the edge of Milwaukee's Garden Homes neighborhood, but one step inside the sprawling structure reveals a world rarely seen in southeastern Wisconsin. A badger the size of a minivan. A bust of Abraham Lincoln. A life-size statue of Sargento co-founder Leonard Gentine. It's a cast of characters more unique than anything on television, but for Michael Nolte, it's home.
Nolte, one of Vanguard's co-owners alongside Beth Sahagian, has been in the sculpting business since 1986. Vanguard works with outside artists to create and complete sculptures by mold making, enlarging scale models, bronze casting, fabrication, installation, restoration, repair, and more. Vanguard has brought pieces to life all across the area, including the "Bronze Fonz" in downtown Milwaukee, the Mary Tyler Moore statue in Minneapolis, Gertie the Duck on Milwaukee's riverwalk, and countless others. Vanguard also finished off the popular "Da Crusher" statue, which was unveiled earlier this month in South Milwaukee to a crowd of tens of thousands.
The length of the process varies on the size of the piece, but once the artist brings in a design, Nolte and his Vanguard team create a mold of that piece using rubber, plaster, and wax; construct a ceramic shell on top of the wax; and eventually pour the liquefied bronze into the shell.
Not only is there plenty of precision required to complete each project, but many pieces are incredibly labor intensive as well. "Da Crusher," for example, weighs over 600 pounds and took roughly 400 hours to complete.
Unsurprisingly, routinely creating, lifting, and moving heavy objects can put some wear and tear on the body. That's where Nolte's T'ai Chi habit comes in.
"In 1986, when I started working at the foundry, I had terrible back problems," Nolte said. "And it was because of the work I was doing. I was reaching into a dip tank and standing up, and it was terrible on my back.
"So a friend of mine - my current business partner - said, 'hey, there's a guy teaching T'ai Chi down at the park; let's go.' So we went down there, and while I was doing T'ai Chi, my back didn't hurt. I did it every day, many times a day, because that was the only time I wasn't in pain.
"And after six months of that, my back pain went away, and has never returned."
Of course, that didn't mean Nolte was going to simply give up T'ai Chi once his back issues were resolved; T'ai Chi "allows him to do what he [does]" - work in his art foundry.
Nolte eventually flipped from a T'ai Chi participant to an instructor, and just completed his 27th year leading T'ai Chi classes for a variety of age groups and class sizes. He has had many long-time participants - some of whom have taken his classes for over a decade - and he enjoys seeing their progression with each lesson. He currently instructs at the Milwaukee School of Languages for Milwaukee Recreation, and understands that guiding these sessions helps him continue to hone his own T'ai Chi.
"Teaching is the best way to learn T'ai Chi, [at least] once you get past the basics," Nolte said. "Without explaining it to someone else, I don't believe T'ai Chi would be so clear in my head."
He still completes the T'ai Chi forms each day, once in both the morning and the evening, and plans on working at the foundry as long as he can keep doing T'ai Chi.
"It saves my life every day," Nolte said.