Branko Medenica

From Bhamwiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Branko Medenica

Branko Medenica (born July 17, 1950 in Germany) is a sculptor and owner of the Sculpture Sight studio at 417 25th Street South in Birmingham.

Medenica left Germany with his parents when he was a year old. They lived in New York and Pittsburgh before moving to Huntsville, where his father worked for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Medenica graduated from Lee High School there, after which his family moved to Washington D.C.

Medenica returned to Alabama to earn his undergraduate degree (1972) and a master's in business administration at Birmingham-Southern College. He read in a magazine that most people worked in jobs that they could barely tolerate, and he resolved not to fall into that trap, and returned to school to study art at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He completed his master's in fine arts in 1975. After graduating he toured small communities in five states over seven months on the Michigan Art Train.

Back in Birmingham, Medenica applied for unemployment and told counselors that he was hoping for an "art job." As luck would have it, within a week Birmingham City Schools put in a request for a sculptor to create an outdoor work to commemorate the adoption of an "Arts in Education" curriculum at Lakeview Elementary School. Medenica was commissioned to create the 15-foot-tall concrete and metal "Resurgence".

Later that year, Medenica was offered work as a steel fabricator with the J. C. McGahan Company, a manufacturer of pressure tank heads. When he was laid off in 1983 he opened his own studio, "Sculpture Sight".

Medenica co-founded the Birmingham Arts Commission in 1980 and was gallery director for the Greater Birmingham Arts Alliance from 1980 to 1981. He has served as a juror for fine arts at the Alabama State Fair, as an artist-in-residence at UAB, Birmingham City Schools and Mountain Brook High School, and as a guest lecturer at Washington & Lee University.

Works

Gallery

References

  • Parson, Mary Jean (October 1989) "Accessible Art, Branko Medenica Wants to Create Art that All People Can See and Touch". Birmingham magazine
  • Parker, Melissa (January 29, 2009) "Casting an image: Sculptor Branko Medenica molds a career in Alabama." Our Prattville
  • Bryant, Joseph D. (January 23, 2012) "Statue coming in 2013 for Charles H. Linn, namesake of Birmingham's Linn Park." The Birmingham News
  • Rocker, Maggie & Sammie Auer (February 19, 2016) "Time capsule mystery from 1976 cracked in AL.com Vintage photos." The Birmingham News

External links