Kevin Kresse’s home in Little Rock is, by his own admission, somewhere between a “friggin’ Frankenstein lab” and a “Madame Tussaud’s of Arkansas musicians.” Lining the sculptor’s kitchen walls, topping the tables, and squatting on the back porch are the spot-on likenesses of Levon Helm, Al Green, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Glen Campbell, and Johnny Cash. What started as a 2016 commission to create a bronze bust of Helm, legendary drummer of the Band, eventually became “my own build-it-and-hopefully-they’ll-come project of sculpting Arkansas musicians,” he says.
Fortunately for Kresse, he didn’t have to wait long: In April 2019, then-Governor Asa Hutchinson signed a bill into law calling for statues of Cash and civil rights activist Daisy Gatson Bates to replace those of Uriah M. Rose and Governor James P. Clarke in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. After submitting a proposal in 2020, Kresse was chosen to create an eight-foot likeness of Cash—one that was just unveiled today. We spoke with Kresse about the artistic process, what onlookers might miss at first glance, and what it means for Bates and Cash to represent Arkansas on the national stage.
Cash maintained a public presence for the better part of half a century, and there were no doubt countless ways to depict him. How did you decide what version of him to go with?
As my father-in-law would say, “That’s very observatory of you.” During the early seventies, Cash was healthy. He was happy. His son had been born. He was on national television. It was probably his most high-profile time, so that seemed to me to be the right time frame. And then it turned out that the Cash family also wanted that time frame…