Horses ‘grazing’ at Old Mill
Workers place the last of three horse sculptures in position adjacent to Field & Stream and Buffalo Wild Wings at Old Mill.
Sculptors Lucas Warner, left, and Jeff Fetty await placement of the last of three steel horses on a grassy strip near Field & Stream and Buffalo Wild Wings at Old Mill.
Wild horses couldn’t keep some people away from the Old Mill. Now they are at the Old Mill.
Heavy-equipment operators meticulously placed three equine sculptures on concrete pedestals at midday Thursday, in a grassy lot adjacent to Field & Stream and Buffalo Wild Wings. The artwork was commissioned by the retail center’s owners, Michael Staenberg and Donald Mosites.
It is the second artsy collection to adorn the 104-acre development off Route 19 in South Strabane Township. A surrealistic steel sculpture, built when the Foundry was taking shape years ago – and before that project collapsed – was pieced together in recent months and placed along a driveway nearby.
Blacksmith artists Jeff Fetty and Lucas Warner of Spencer, W.Va., did the work on the horses. “We’re following techniques that blacksmiths have used for centuries,” said Fetty, 61. In essence, they take hot steel from the forge, drop it onto an anvil and shape it with hammers and presses. They work tediously until they come up with a satisfying shape.
“We hand forge every piece,” Fetty said. “All pieces are cut out, polished and fashioned.”
Why horses?
“That’s on Jeff’s end,” said Warner, 25, who has been Fetty’s assistant for 14 months. This is his first large publicly displayed sculpture.
“There was an infinite number of style options,” Warner said. “We wanted an outdoors theme and came up with horses.
“Whether it was horses, black bears or deer, it was going to be larger than life.”
The horses are brown, about 8 feet tall, weigh 1,500 pounds, and took three to four months to complete, Fetty said.
They please Andy Boyd, who was on hand for the chilly unveiling. Boyd is a senior asset manager for The Staenberg Group, the St. Louis-based shopping center developer in charge of Old Mill.
“We were planning to have some type of amenity here,” he said.
Fetty has been doing this for 42 years and has established a global reputation. He has done work for luminaries such as Yves St. Laurent, Jon Bon Jovi, Maya Angelou, Tom Clancy and the Bill Clinton administration.
This is Fetty’s third gig with Mike Staenberg, president of TSG and co-founder of THF Realty.
The first was an arrangement of metal flowers in Charleston, W.Va., followed by a project in Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, on the site of the former Greengate Mall.
Fetty said, “I appreciate people going the extra mile to enhance a project and give artists like me a chance to share their art with different communities.”
At Old Mill, he is the mane man.