The Tale of the Wolves

By David Hunt

Michael Stutz likes to tell stories about the sculptures he creates. It’s a quiet Friday afternoon in a dimly lit auditorium at NC State University and Stutz, always grinning, is deep into storytelling mode as he shows slides of some of his most compelling work to an audience of design students. The California-based artist is on campus for the unveiling of his latest public art project: three larger-than-life bronze wolves installed at the new “Wolf Plaza,” guarding the approach to the student bookstore and several residence halls.

The sculptures are part of a continuing campus beautification project helped along by the bond referendum of 2000 that allowed NC State to undertake facility construction and renovation projects across campus.

“Here they are,” Stutz declares as an image of the trio fills the screen at the front of the auditorium. “Ready for all sorts of adventures  that we can only imagine.”

Michael Stutz created the woven bronze sculptures at his studio in Fallbrook, Calif.

Stutz’ career has been an improbable adventure in its own right. A native of southeast Tennessee, Stutz earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1986, close to home, but managed to gain a global perspective by traveling to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in his junior year for a study abroad program at Ulster Polytechnic University. After a brief stint as a billboard painter, he moved to San Francisco, where he built props for the film and fashion industry, then moved again – this time to New Orleans – where he built Mardi Gras parade floats from 1993 to 1996.

Retracing his steps to San Francisco, Stutz set up shop as an artist and went to work perfecting the techniques he used  on parade floats to create dramatic sculptures out of cardboard. He wandered the streets of what he calls, “a particularly gritty part of San Francisco,” collecting discarded cardboard boxes for a public art installation in the lobby of a rundown hotel that was being converted into housing for the homeless.

Once completed, the giant sculpture, titled “Crib,” could be viewed at street-level through the lobby’s bank of plate glass windows. The starkly lit form of a naked person curled into a fetal position mirrored the sense of abandonment and desperation so evident in the faces of the transients who shuffled along on the street in front of the hotel.

One day a homeless man confronted Stutz about the sculpture. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” he declared. The man then admitted that he’d passed by the sculpture the night before, on his way to confront another man who had wronged him.

The wolves stand guard at Wolf Plaza near the student bookstore. View a photo gallery of Michael Stutz' artwork, including the wolf sculptures he created for NC State.

“I was going to kill him,” he told Stutz. “But when I saw that,” he said, pointing to the enormous figure in the windows of the hotel, “it made me think of the baby Jesus, and I just stopped.”

As Stutz concludes the story, the design students are transfixed. They came to hear about his artistic influences and the challenges of building a client base. But this was bigger. This was about the power of art to heal and move and transform.

It had been a turning point for Stutz as much as the homeless man.

Now based in the small town of Fallbrook in north San Diego county, Stutz works primarily in bronze, but in a way that allows his creations – whether hawk or horse, man or wolf – to soar. His artwork is porous, open to the world, reflective and conductive of light, and almost fragile for all its tensile strength.

The road from talented craftsman to artist began for Stutz when he found that art could have a life of its own, outside of his ideas and intentions, that it could change a heart and change the world.

“It transformed my sense of what it meant to make art,” he tells the students. “Before, I was into Michael Stutz and letting people know how great he is. But afterwards, everything was different."

Things are different at NC State as well, where nearly a decade of capital improvement work is bringing a new sense of pride to the expansive campus. Wolfpack pride was clearly on display in early March, as employees and students crowded around the Wolf Plaza sculptures for an official unveiling of the new campus icons. Students playfully climbed on the 1,200-pound wolves, laughing and whooping, as employees posed for pictures in the bright sun.

"We are the wolfpack, the wolfpack family," Student Body President Jim Ceresnak said, after jumping down from one of the sculptures. "These pieces of art create such a great space to be proud of on our campus."

Among the campus beautification projects still in the works are new gateways at Watauga Club Drive and Achievement Drive, new steps connecting the 1911 Building to the Court of North Carolina, and pedestrian-friendly improvements on Chamberlain Drive.

Links:

• College of Design

• Michael Stutz Sculpture and Design 

• Watch a Video of the Unveiling