Rodger Mack Sandcast Brutalist Sculpture

Rodger Mack was born on November 8, 1938, in Barberton, Ohio. He enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art as an industrial design student, and he was intent on using what he learned in college to advance in a career of car design. Mack received his BFA degree from the Cleveland Institute of Arts in 1961, and his MFA with a concentration in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1963. After graduating with his master’s degree, Mack received a Fulbright Scholarship. This allowed him to travel to Florence between 1963–64 to further his art education. While in Florence, Mack learned multiple casting techniques and created sixteen cast-bronze sculptures at the Bruno Bearzi Foundry. Shortly after Mack’s return from Florence, the governor of Arkansas asked him to help found the Arkansas Art Center, which offered a BFA degree program. Mack taught drawing, three-dimensional design, and ceramics, and also constructed a foundry with the help of students. After four years, however, the BFA program was terminated, and he elected to move on to other endeavors. In 1968, Syracuse University hired Mack as a sculpture professor. He received tenure in 1971, just a few short years after he began teaching, and between 1982–91, Mack served as the director of the University’s School of Art and Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Throughout his lifetime, Mack exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his sculptures were bought by many museums. Mack’s last large public commission was permanently installed at the New York State Fair Grounds in July 2002. Titled Missing in Action, it is a monolithic bronze sculpture memorializing lost soldiers. Mack passed away on September 16, 2002, in Syracuse.