Centennial Reflection for Erie Insurance

Centennial Reflection was made for a company that stayed in one city for a hundred years.

Erie Insurance asked for a work that could carry that fact without turning it into a plaque. The sculpture stands a little over 11.5 feet on a 10-by-10-foot footprint. The base is a Roman numeral C. Four rising pillars mark the four pillars of the company and step up through each quarter century.

Material mattered as much as the diagram. The piece includes reclaimed elements from the H.O. Hirt Building - not as nostalgia stuck on the surface, but as structure inside a new form. I wanted the building that held the company early life to keep working inside the object that marks the hundredth year.

A public commission at this scale is a sequence of unromantic problems: load, footing, finish, install window, how the piece reads at 60 feet and at 6 feet. The work has to be true in the drawing and true on the crane.

Photographs from the unveiling were made by Erie Insurance Strategic Communications. The sculpture is sited. It is not for sale. It is in the portfolio because this is the class of work the studio is built to do.

If your institution is marking a founding, a building, or a death of a founder, that is the conversation this piece came from.

- Adam Stempka