In Jackie Robinson statue, ‘no turning back’
Ballplayer who broke color barrier depicted by Oakland sculptor
The Jackie Robinson statue at Dodger Stadium depicts him sliding into the plate with a steal of home.
“You’ll be called safe or you’ll be called out, but you’re committed,” sculptor Branly Cadet said. “Metaphorically, Jackie represented that point in American history and certainly baseball history where there was no turning back.”
Cadet, 52, is an artist from Oakland who sculpted the bronze statue that was unveiled on April 15, Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the 70th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color line. The Giants will get their first look Monday, when they open a fourgame series in Los Angeles.
Out of his West Oakland studio, Cadet took 18 months to complete the work commissioned by the Dodgers, a process that was both a labor of love and a journey through history.
By all accounts, Cadet, 52, was the right sculptor and crafted the right pose, showing the determination and courage of a fearless man who broke through barriers with both force and dignity.
The son of parents who immigrated from Haiti, Cadet was born in Manhattan, raised in Queens and settled in Brooklyn, the home of Robinson’s Dodgers. He enjoyed sculpting as a kid and studied at Cornell University and the New York Academy of Art.
Later, Cadet taught and did many art projects, the most momentous being a 21-foot statue of Adam Clayton Powell
Jr., New York’s first African American congressman, which is in front of the New York State Office Building.
When Cadet’s wife, Natasha Singh, landed a teaching gig in the Bay Area, the couple settled in Oakland.
“I can do what I do anywhere on the planet as long as I have enough space,” Cadet said. “I wanted to be in an urban setting, a context where there are lots of artists and diversity.”
Everything about the Robinson project was meticulously prepared and orchestrated, including exhibiting the start of Robinson’s slide, not the end. That, Cadet said, signifies “the start of this new era” of integration in baseball and beyond.
The statue — the first at Dodger Stadium — weighs 700 to 800 pounds, rests on a granite base weighing 35,000 pounds and is 8 feet high including the base. It was unveiled in a ceremony attended by Jackie’s widow, Rachel Robinson, and her family; announcer Vin Scully; former teammates Don Newcombe and Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, and other dignitaries, along with Cadet.
“As an artist, there is a lot of thought and emotion that goes into the piece,” Cadet said. “It can be a very emotional process thinking about the person I’m rendering and what he went through and the impact he had on people’s lives.” That quote evokes one from Robinson himself, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives,” which is inscribed at the base of the actual statue.
Cadet said some onlookers told him they cried when they saw the statue unveiled.
“That is like the highest praise for an artist, certainly from what I try to do,” Cadet said. “I try to capture the spirit of an individual who made a difference.”
Cadet expressed interest in the project simply by contacting the Dodgers through their website. His wishes were passed along to executives who researched his work and decided to meet with him, ultimately choosing him from among 20 artists considered.
“We thought Branly’s public art came across with very powerful expression and depicted non-athletes in a way that triggered emotion, and that’s what we wanted with Jackie Robinson,” said Janet Marie Smith, the Dodgers’ senior vice president of planning and development.
“We thought it was nice to have someone from California, and we thought it was nice to have a man of color capture someone who broke so many barriers, someone who was more than just a sports figure.”
Is Cadet a baseball fan? Hardly. He’ll wait until the playoffs to pay attention. He said his brother and cousins are big fans and kid him about his being the one to sculpt a baseball legend.
Cadet is working on another statue of black educator and civil rights activist Octavius Catto, to be erected this summer at Philadelphia City Hall. Catto pushed for desegregating horse-drawn streetcars and for increasing the opportunities for blacks to to vote, among other causes. He was gunned down on election day in 1871 at age 32.
Catto also was a second baseman and founded a celebrated all-black Philadelphia team, which played an all-white squad in baseball’s first documented interracial game.
Cadet’s first step in any project is research. With Robinson, he pored over books, biographies, documentaries, movies and, of course, hundreds and hundreds of pictures — as opposed to the Catto project, in which just one photograph of his subject was available.
Cadet started with a foothigh gestural maquette — a sculptor’s preliminary model — that was devoid of Robinson’s likeness, then created a 3-foot maquette that included the likeness of Robinson’s clothing and muscle structure with more refined proportions.
Once Cadet received approval from the Dodgers and the Robinson family, he began sculpting the statue, creating three-dimensional planes by constantly manipulating the clay, a process that lasted 500 to 700 hours, he said.
“That’s the part I get lost in,” Cadet said. “It’s really timeconsuming and probably extremely boring for anyone who’s not into doing that.”
Based on his research, decisions were made on everything down to the smallest details, including how many holes were in the buttons (four), where the scripted lettering would break on the jersey (“Do” on one side, “dgers” on the other) and how broad the shoulders would be. (Newcombe provided input.)
The sequence from there: clay to wax to ceramic shell to bronze (which was poured into the shell) to patina. A 2½-inch stainless steel rod was inserted for support, and it was wrapped and shipped to Los Angeles.
The Giants have five statues of Hall of Famers around AT&T Park, and folks in Los Angeles wonder whether Scully or Koufax is next at Dodger Stadium. Some also wonder what took so long on Robinson. But at least a statue was erected, and it can be seen when entering the stadium through the left-field reserve plaza.
“Anyone who’s sculpting a historical figure, especially a historical figure as significant as Jackie Robinson, should be present to the weight of that,” Cadet said. “It’s not something that can be taken lightly.”