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Photo by Crush Rush
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Photo by Crush Rush
Maria Kirby-Smith
Hometown: Camden.
Claim to fame: She’s made a career creating statues of the famous and influential, along with ordinary folks.
Co-op connection: Black River Electric Cooperative member.
Statues of note:
“Peg Leg” Bates, a one-legged tap dancer from Travelers Rest who performed on Broadway in the 1930s, appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 19 times and performed twice for the Queen of England.
Lt. James Heriot, a World War I Medal of Honor recipient from Lee County who single-handedly charged a machine gun emplacement and, despite being wounded, forced it to surrender. He was killed later that day charging a second machine gun.
Larry Doby and Bernard Baruch, two of Camden’s favorite sons, a Black baseball legend and a Jewish financier who advised six presidents, respectively.
Maria Kirby-Smith is a storyteller, but her stories aren’t shared around a campfire or told in the pages of a book. She spins her tales in bronze.
Her works are displayed throughout the nation and the continent. A coal miner memorial in Virginia. An angel in Mexico City. Town squares, gardens and parks across her home state of South Carolina. She’s now sculpting Ernest Finney, South Carolina’s first Black state Supreme Court chief justice.
Kirby-Smith remembers taking a clay model of Matthew Perry, South Carolina’s first Black federal judge since Reconstruction, into a Columbia courthouse to be reviewed by the man himself. “I believe I’m the only person who ever brought a judge’s head through security in a picnic basket. They said, ‘Forensics is down to the left.’”
For an 8-foot-tall statue of Revolutionary War hero Thomas Sumter, Kirby-Smith had only a single portrait flatteringly painted late in his life for reference. But historical descriptions told a different story—the Fighting Gamecock was likely not a handsome man, but rough and rugged. “I made him too pretty at first, like Fabio,” she says. “He was more like a pirate.”
Strom Thurmond, who was the nation’s longest-serving U.S. senator before his death, had a lot to say about his statue as she worked on it. “He said he wanted to look like a man who out-talked two wives,” she laughs. “I gave him twice as much hair as the plastic surgeons.”
“You have to get to know them,” she says from her studio, hidden down three dirt roads in Kershaw County’s horse country. “You want to hear their stories. Talk to the people who knew them.”
The sculptor sometimes includes critters squirreled away in her sculptures, intended to pique the interest of the curious viewer.
“It adds a little levity to a subject that’s often serious,” she says. “And if it engages people in history and gets them interested in the story, that’s not a bad thing.”