The Creative Process

In 1955, the Board of Commissioners of the Detroit-Wayne Joint Building Authority commissioned Marshall Fredericks to create a sculpture for the new City-County Building (now Coleman A. Young Municipal Center) at the foot of Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. Fredericks worked with Harley, Ellington and Day, the building’s architectural firm, from the inception of the project to ensure a unified concept.

To link the sculpture to the building, which was to be a long rectangle, Fredericks treated the narrow end of the structure as a single monument. He started with the idea of tying the sculpture together with a big curved wall and then with building itself. According to Fredericks, he was “able to tie it down to the ground and to bring it down to a personal human size [so] you just didn’t walk into a big box”.

The curved marble wall behind the bronze figure forms a transition between the sculpture and the imposing building behind it. To identify the building and its function as the home of city and county government offices, Fredericks added the official seals of Wayne County and the city of Detroit to the marble wall. 

As you can see in these sketches and drawings, Fredericks toyed with several ideas for the kneeling figure seated in front of the wall as well as for the objects in the figure’s hands. These drawings include notations penned by Fredericks that provide insight into his creative process. Gleaned from Fredericks’s project files, these informal sketches along with the presentation drawing, illustrate the multiple processes involved in creating a sculpture.