Around Concord: How an Idaho artist recreated Christa McAuliffe in the State House statue

Benjamin Victor lost a lot of sleep last year.

While sculpting the statue of Christa McAuliffe that now stands on the State House lawn, Victor’s workdays often stretched into long hours. Despite racing against a tight deadline, the Idaho-based sculptor said he wouldn’t trade the experience.

“I just can’t think of any project that could be more inspiring than Christa,” Victor said. “Any time I lost sleep or anything like that, it was well worth it.”

The seven months spent crafting a statue of the Concord teacher, who amassed a national following for her role as the first teacher in space aboard the ill-fated 1986 Challenger mission, involved hours upon hours of work and scrupulous attention to detail from the many artists and tradespeople who worked on it.

Victor, former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and McAuliffe’s family unveiled the statue on Sept. 2, 2024, which would’ve been McAuliffe’s 76th birthday.

Recreating McAuliffe

Once selected by a state commission to make it, Victor started by finding every possible angle of McAuliffe that he could. He studied photos, like her headshot from NASA and pictures of her from magazines and books. He watched the film of her boarding the Challenger and decided to model her in motion, looking slightly up to the sky, walking with the wind in her hair.

Using those images, he worked with an illustrator in Idaho to draw what he wanted the statue to look like and then created a scale model of the statue with clay. Then, it was time to start sculpting the real one.

Victor said he used an armature, which uses sturdy materials to act as a framework underneath the clay. In this one, he used steel and Styrofoam.

“If you have a standing figure, especially one walking like how she is, then you definitely need something to support the weight of the clay,” Victor said. “On top of the foam is the clay, which really is the material for the sculpting portion. It’s less structural, but the clay is more capable, where I can work it and carve any detail I want to.”

Generally, Victor likes to take about four months to mold the clay, but he worked on overdrive to get it done in time for McAuliffe’s birthday.

By June, he’d finished the clay structure and began to make a mold to pour the bronze into. Victor said he did that by painting the clay with a special kind of rubber, then topped it off with reinforced plaster to hold the shape.

Then, he meticulously peeled off the mold. If that part of the process went awry or anything got damaged, he said, he’d have to start back from square one.

“That’s your one shot,” Victor said. “We got it right, thank goodness.”

He poured wax into the mold and fixed any imperfections he could find, then took it to a foundry for what’s called the lost wax process: It got dipped in a ceramic shell and passed through a high-temperature oven, where the wax was melted out. That empty space inside the ceramic was then refilled with molten bronze.

All of these parts of the process involved experienced labor from experts, Victor said. Nearly a dozen people worked on it with him, not counting those who built the statue’s granite base or those who installed it.

“Each step takes a lot of hours from artisans that are incredibly gifted and trained to do their portion,” Victor said. “It’s really expensive, because when you think of having, like, five or 10 different people work on this piece throughout the start-to-finish process – obviously all talented and good people – that costs a lot of money alone.”

Once they have the bronze, a metal worker welds it, then chafes it, meaning he smoothes everything out, removing any sign of the welds, and fixes seams and air bubbles. Victor said he wants a creation to look perfect before he begins with the patina: the last step before McAuliffe’s statue was shipped off to New Hampshire.

Patina gives the bronze its color. Victor heated the metal and sprayed it with different chemicals to achieve the right hue. He also polished the details, like the zippers and patches on her spacesuit, to really make them pop.

He finished the patina just in the nick of time, the night before the statue made its multi-day, cross-country journey to Concord, transported by a specially dedicated driver.

Personal connections

Before embarking on this project, Victor already knew Barbara Morgan, McAuliffe’s alternate for Teacher in Space program on the Challenger. She lives near him in Boise and had kept her spacesuit all these years. It’s identical to McAuliffe’s, and she loaned it to him so he could capture every detail.

“Another thing that was really amazing is just to get to talk to Barbara throughout the process,” Victor said. “It just meant the world to Barb that I was doing this. She had some tears throughout the process and when she saw the sculpture in person … It’s just a type of thing where I’m like, ‘Man, I’m humbled just to get to do this.’”

Victor also remembers his own Challenger experience. When the explosion happened, he was 7 years old, watching it on the television at school. But over the past year, he’s learned more about McAuliffe’s life than her death.

“It was just so bad and so, so tragic in so many ways, but the beauty of it is that her life did have an impact and did have meaning,” Victor said. “The magnetism she had and the way that she really burst onto the national stage, people just immediately loved her and gravitated towards her because she had that magnetic personality. That will always live on, and it’s just great to be a part of that legacy.”​​​​​​

Charlotte Matherly can be reached at cmatherly@cmonitor.com ​​​​​​