In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

Nick Christensen remembers the first time he visited Brodin Bronze about 25 years ago as a recent high school graduate.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” he recalled of his first exposure to the bronze sculpting process.

The owners offered him a job and he was hooked. He worked part time through college before joining the studio full time as a sculptor in 2003. 

Now he runs the studio with his wife Kelsey and 18 employees. 

Brodin Studios started in a Minneapolis warehouse in 1978, created by two brothers, one a Minneapolis police officer, the other an artist. A third brother later joined the business.

“They were able to carve out this specific niche in public safety and we’ve just kind of grown and expanded off that over the years,” said Christensen, 43. 

The business is now located in rural Kimball, about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities. 

The studio produces about 20 full-size sculptures a year for police, firefighter or military memorials. They’ve installed more than 450 across the country. That includes more than 50 in Minnesota, from a monument in the northwestern town of Warren remembering veterans suffering from PTSD to a sculpture of nurses helping a wounded soldier at the VA medical center in Minneapolis.

Workers also turn out dozens of small 6-inch or 8-inch statues used for awards by public safety agencies. 

“Our goal is to try to provide them with something they can’t get anywhere else,” said Christensen as he held a 6-inch statue of a police officer. “So basically what you see here nobody else makes this, nobody.”  

What makes these sculptures unique is the level of detail. Shoulder patches one-quarter inch wide on a 6-inch sculpture are personalized for each department. Uniforms are exact replicas down to the buttons, badges and rank. 

In a large noisy metal working shop workers weld and grind as they assemble large statues from many cast bronze pieces. Detail is the focus here as well, from belt buckles to weapons and the texture of clothing, everything is painstakingly replicated. 

“We’re not making this for art galleries, for people that look at them from an artistic perspective,” said Christensen. 

“Our clientele, they don’t look at it as art. They’re looking at it as a reflection of the people in service,” he said. “You can’t put out something that’s super abstract or super unrealistic and garner the same feedback.” 

Brodin Bronze uses the centuries-old lost wax process to create sculptures. 

A detailed figure is first carved in wax. The wax is repeatedly dipped in a ceramic slurry to create a thick shell. Then the wax is melted in an oven, leaving the ceramic form which is filled with molten bronze. 

Large sculptures can take months, or even years to complete. 

“They’re all made in many, many pieces, and then they’re welded back together,” Christensen explained. “So you gotta grind, weld, cut, manipulate to get everything to fit back together. There’s just a lot of tedious bending, cutting, fitting.”

The latest 3D printing technology complements the ancient lost wax technique. Christensen uses the printers to save time by making large parts like a torso or legs for a sculpture. Then a human artist uses clay to add details to the plastic base.

The company has installed sculptures in almost every state. A map on the wall shows clusters of installations in many parts of the country, a result of word-of-mouth advertising.

There’s still a large potential market for statues honoring public safety or military personnel, said Christensen, but the company is branching out. 

For a city in Michigan, they created seven life-sized bronze Wizard of Oz characters. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation commissioned an installation to honor park rangers who protect endangered gorillas in Africa. 

But Christensen said while they expand, the studio will maintain the focus company founders envisioned, paying tribute to those who put their lives on the line in public service.

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Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.