Famed for his monumental sculpture, particularly the doors to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Robert Graham passed away Saturday in Santa Monica. Below, an interview he did for Zócalo with KPCC Southern California Public Radio’s Adolfo Guzman-Lopez in 2006.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez: My understanding is that you didn’t really start out in the ’60s after art school as a large-scale sculptor. How did you get into that?

Robert Graham: Well you know the franchises for artists when I graduated art school were very limited, it was galleries. Galleries developed you until someone bought the pieces, and then they were given to museums. There wasn’t any kind of alternative, like having public work. The stuff out in the public was looked at by the art world as having some kind of diminished quality. So when I was asked by Larry Halprin, 40 years ago I think, to join him with George Segal and Leonard Baskin to do the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, none of the artists including myself knew we could do anything like this – to go out of our kind of comfort level….

Between the time when we were asked to make work and the time it was [dedicated]… I was asked to do the Memorial Coliseum statues for the Olympics, and so those were the first things that got finished. The Roosevelt Memorial wasn’t finished till the late ’90s. But making the gateway for the Olympics was an incredible experience for me that changed the way I felt about what I did. All of a sudden it wasn’t something that had to have my authorship in a sense. It was something that had to do with the Olympics. All I had to do was make something that was in sympathy with the Olympics and in sympathy with the 1922 stadium. So the gateway was in front of the stadium and just continued that kind of historical reference from 1922 to the ’84 Olympics.

So it was something I made to be a gateway for the athletes coming in from Figueroa Street. They changed that and made it into a TV spectacle so the athletes were already in the stadium, and they didn’t have to go through the thing. I was very disappointed by that. It wasn’t really finished till the last Olympics, during which Mayor Riordan made sure that the torch that came into the stadium actually passed through the gateway. And so it took all that time for it to be consecrated….

There was a changing of my ideas of what an artist can be. Having been given the franchise to make something that people recognize without having to know who made it was a great thing. And it’s been confirmed through my other monuments – the Roosevelt, Joe Louis, the Charlie Parker Memorial.

Guzman-Lopez: You were born in Mexico City and spent your childhood and teenage years there before coming to study at San Jose State College in 1961. What do you remember about Mexico City? Because Mexico City is known as the City of Palaces, the Ciudad de los Palacios, and it has a very long tradition of sculpture going back three hundred, four hundred years. Do you remember seeing some of those sculptures and monuments growing up?

Graham: Yes, my mother, ever since I was very small, took me to the pyramids and we explored that. There were a lot of places around that she would take me to – Cuernavaca, Guadalajara – that had these important things. I was born in the center of Mexico City pretty much near the Alameda and next to the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Having gone almost every weekend to the palace, I would see these paintings coming in, the Siqueiros and the Orozcos. There’s a hotel there, with the mural, Sueño de una tarde dominical, by Rivera, and the hotel was destroyed during the quake but I remember it very vividly. My mother would take me to the hotel, and it had a soda fountain with milkshakes. I went for my first milkshake and saw the Rivera.

Guzman-Lopez: Was it a shock for you to come to the U.S. in the early ’60s?

Graham: I don’t think so. When you’re a kid you don’t know. It’s just great, big yards, you play and run. The city was tight, urban. Even then, when it was very small, there was still a vibrant city.

Guzman-Lopez: What were your ideas as you were going through art school and as you were getting your MFA in San Francisco about what kind of art you wanted to do?

Graham: Well I think I was just responding to what people did…. I was just part of the student body that was left alone to come up with something of my own. I was making those very small figures at that time, which was contrary to the abstract expressionism of the time, so it was a little weird to be there. I was making these little boxes with little figures, and they were well received but not really part of the mainstream. They were received as curiosities. I had all these exhibitions at that point on from L.A.. to Europe, and it wasn’t until the Roosevelt Memorial was offered to me that my ideas about what I could do as an artist, that I could be part of this whole social fabric, started changing.

Guzman-Lopez: In reading about your work I can’t help but go back to Auguste Rodin and to remember that he sought commissions very much. One of Rodin’s most important commissions was for the Burghers of Calais, which sought to memorialize a siege of a town, and how these prominent citizens of that town had given themselves up as slaves in order to stop the siege of the town. That’s one of his most impressive works. Do you see some of your commissions in a similar way?

Graham: Well I think certainly the ones I’ve been lucky enough to have, they are either adopted or not in context. Charlie Parker in the place where he started out – Kansas City, on Vine Street, which is worlds apart from Kansas City, it was just another district with bars that stayed open all night and people played music. It was an amazing kind of thing – people who live there now, how proud they were to have the Charlie Parker memorial there. So things like that are very important, that people actually take to something like that. The Duke Ellington Memorial in New York was in a pretty dilapidated corner of Central Park, at 110th and 5th Avenue…. It’s completely changed the area. There’s not one bit of graffiti on it.

Guzman-Lopez: For your monument to Joe Louis in Detroit in 1986, you chose to do a sculpture of Joe Louis’ arm from his fist to where his arm connects to his body, suspended from a pyramid-like structure. Was there a lot of controversy behind that?

Graham: Yeah. I think most of the monuments have been controversial in one way or another. You can never guess what things people are going to be opposed to. Certainly the arm was very controversial – people said “where’s the rest of him?” and that kind of thing. It looked phallic. They wanted to move it when the Pope had this big celebration in front of it. The arm is in the hub of the city, so everything comes out from it, all the streets.

Guzman-Lopez: I’m wondering though, your work is public art, so do you feel you have to pay attention to what the public wants?

Graham: Well, that’s a curious thing. I can’t do anything I’m not passionate about so I’m hoping that how I feel about it is translated to the work itself. I really don’t require instructions about what people want because they don’t know what they want, any more than I know what to make, until I really come to the thing that’s the most satisfying and the best I can come up with. But if you present things to people when they’re half-cooked, they don’t know what they want. They’re all shoppers.

Guzman-Lopez: One of your recent sculptures has been the doors to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels here in Los Angeles, and part of that sculpture was also the sculpture of the Virgin Mary, which you chose to depict as almost an androgynous figure, very different from how the Virgin Mary has been portrayed before. Once again that was very controversial. What did people say?

Graham: Well they didn’t like it so much. One of the opposition said that she didn’t look very much like what the Virgin should look like, the European Virgin. In fact the door and the Cathedral are very unique to Los Angeles. It is something that actually has been filtered through the new world…. It certainly had to do with transferring the image of the Virgin through the conquest…. It was the Virgin in her many manifestations that actually made this possible, to conquer the indigenous people. A lot of Christianity and the indigenous pantheon is kind of mixed in. So this door is very specific to that…. It’s only natural to have the Virgin who has the kind of qualities and features that someone from the New World would have.

Guzman-Lopez: One of the most prominent parts of that door are all the talismans, the amulets, the symbols from different cultures. Tell me about those and how you came to choose them.

Graham: There are 40 symbols on the bottom half of the small doors and those signify the masses in L.A. said in 40 languages. The Diocese asked me if I would take suggestions from all the different cultural symbols that the Catholic Church has, everything from Samoan kava bowl to the Tai Chi symbols from Korea. They were easy to compile and make into this kind of pattern that allowed people to enter through different kinds of things. There are turtles from the Chinese pantheon, dogs and deer, all these things that had some kind of meaning but also keep changing in context.

Guzman-Lopez: It seems to me like you’re saying people want sculpture, that people want these public spaces with monuments. Do you feel that way?

Graham: Yeah, absolutely. I think that they want some meaning, they want something that means something to that neighborhood. And I think the general art world is concerned with global acceptance, things are portable, that can be sent to the auction houses. They can be shown in museums, they can be collected as blue chip objects. The thing about something that’s very local, it’s kind of meaningful to one part of the city or the country and it doesn’t travel well….

When the general art world becomes part of the entertainment industry, it becomes something that has to really change with fashion and whims. To make something that has presence and meaning, it takes a little more thought. I’m reminded of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican Minister of Education in the ’20s in a very right wing administration, and he brought all those Parisian artists back to Mexico. He gave them jobs to paint right on the public buildings in the heart of the palace of government. And those paintings were very critical of government. (rivera orozco) critic of Spaniards. Cortes is this dwarf with a hump, there are capitalist pigs. That stuff is still there, throughout all the right-wing governments and throughout the ages.

Guzman-Lopez: Do we need something like that in L.A.?

Graham: Well I think that’s a possibility, to have something that really is controversial. It can’t all be ornamental and decorative or validated by a museum/gallery/auction house world.

Guzman-Lopez: What do you still have to accomplish, what would you like to do?

Graham: Let’s see what’s offered to me and what I can figure out to do and just keep plugging at it every day.

Guzman-Lopez: And what about for the city you live in, Los Angeles? How do you see your artwork connected to the city?

Graham: Well there are several pieces in the city, so that makes me very happy. I have an exhibition, a retrospective of 40 years at the Ace Gallery and that was very satisfying, to see the things that are homeless, the things I am doing today, to be all together, and I could check myself. I keep doing that. About how I fit into the city, and responses to my work, I have to do a Condi Rice and say that’s history. History.