AlLavergne’s metal sculptures have taken him all around the country -- from Dallas and New Orleans to Kalamazoo, where he taught at Western Michigan University for nearly 25 years. But in 2012, he went farther than he’d ever gone before: Nigeria. He’ll be talking about the experience at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts on July 16th.
On a steamy morning, Lavergne couldn’t be farther away from Africa. He’s inside his tailor-made backyard workshop, hunching over a metal sculpture resembling a huge, metallic bird’s nest.
“My best friend in what I’m doing now will be the cutting torch," Lavergne says over the sounds of sparks flying around him. "It allows me to manipulate the metal in whatever way it turns.”
He presses flame deep into steel, then bends and connects the hundreds of metal rods inside.
“It starts very simply, by heating the metal until it gets red," he explains. "Then I can decide to bend it or cut it. There’s a lot of tapping and pounding. And there’s a lot of praying that this will work!”
Once Lavergne puts down the blow torch, he points me towards a photo in the back of his workshop, of a sculpture called “The Gift.” It’s a giant, metal woman -- 14 feet tall, he says. Her hands are lifted to the sky. Inside them is a child with its arms spread out to its side, like a little angel coming down from heaven.
It’s a sculpture, he says, that first came to life when a Nigerian woodcarver, Lamidi Fakeye, visited Kalamazoo. The two instantly connected, Lavergne says. And before Fakeye left, he told Lavergne, I want you to teach my family and friends, at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.
So Lavergne applied for a federal Fulbright Scholar award to go there. By 2012, he was off to Africa to teach, sculpt, and learn.
"And when I got there, it was nothing like I expected," Lavergne says. "Because people will tell you we have resources. But there are no resources. What are the resources? Nothing."
Lavergne says he didn’t even have a real studio. Instead, he worked in a big, open university hallway, his sparks flying by students walking past. But the setup had an unexpected benefit: people just came up to him and started talking and helping out.
At first, it surprised Lavergne. He admits he went to Nigeria for the reason anybody does – who doesn’t want to travel? But he was an outsider. He opened himself up, though, by wearing Nigerian colors and eating their foods, and everything flowed from there.
"And when they started bringing babies by, that was an expression of emotion and love and acceptance. And valuing you. They would open up to you because the defenses were all gone," he says.
"And after a period of time, they began to see things in me and I began to see things in them that reminded them, made them feel very familiar with me. And I began to see in some of their elders, I began to see my grandmother, in their mannerisms! Their facial expressions. Their warmth. Their smiles. You begin to see all those things."
It wasn’t complete harmony, though. Lavergne says he still had to fight for certain things, like making his sculpture nude, which the university initially resisted. And his newfound friends kept asking him the same question: Are you married? Do you have children?
Every time he answered no, they were shocked. Why not? they prodded.
"It got to the point where I got tired of answering this every day. Every day!" Lavergne says.
"So I came up, I said, 'You're right, I have children!'
'How many, how many?'
'Oh, I have 300 children.'
'300?' They were really impressed, they looked at each other, '300?'
I said that's right! I'm a busy man. I've got 300 kids!
'Well, where are they?'
I said, 'Well, I've got 300 sculptures.'
They said, 'Well that's not what we mean.'
I said really, why not? What's your children going to do for you?
'Well, our children are going to live on after us.'
I said, my sculptures are going to live on after me! I said, go ahead, what else?
'Well, our children are going to provide for us!'
I said, 'Well my children brought me on this trip!'
Then they looked at me, looked at each other, then hugged me.
'Yes, you do have children!'
The questions even inspired Lavergne. You want me to have a wife and child? he thought. Well, I’ll build one. Up sprouted “The Gift,” his 14-foot sculpture, a piece of him left in Nigeria.
"So I said, now I have a wife and a child in Nigeria. I will never be away," Lavergne says.
He says leaving these people who had adopted him like their own was really hard. But as he wrapped his work, he realized something: he looked at his own sculptures and compared them to the bold and aggressive Nigerian designs around him. He was surprised to see just how similar they were, despite being thousands of miles apart.
"I think I was doing some kind of Nigerian imagery before I went to Nigeria! And that was the most satisfying part of it," he says. "I went there and found a home where I belong, in that sense."
You can hear more about “The Gift” at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts on Thursday, July 16th at 6:30 p.m.
