After ten long years of working, Detroit finally finished constructing their RoboCop statue. Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf, members of the arts and cultural community in Detroit shared their experience with The Metro Times.
How the idea for a RoboCop statue was birthed
A Detroit resident reportedly told the mayor of the city that they wished for a statue. The duo raised $17,000 in only three days via crowd-funding to erect the iconic monument. Fred Barton Productions took over character designing. Due to issues such as the artist getting diagnosed with cancer and compromised structural integrity, the project kept getting delayed until Giorgio Gikas stepped in to deliver the final product.
Gikas and his team completed the statue. However, they did incur heavy financial losses. The decade-long process also meant that the proposed site changed massively, which is why RoboCop must find a new home in Detroit. At first, the Michigan Science Center (or MiSci) was selected to the sci-fi monument site, but the organization moved in a different direction.
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MiSci on having to deny being the home of the RoboCop statue
They explained their gratitude for being the considered site for RoboCop and spoke about MiSci being a non-profit organization with no funding from the city, state, or federal government. They had worked alongside Imagination Station and planned to install the 11-foot-tall bronze statue adjacent to the Centre, which conjuncts their grounds. However, that would incur high expenses, which they could afford back in 2018 before the pandemic had struck. Due to the unprecedented pressures on their resources due to the pandemic, especially as an organization with no government funding, they had to shift their focus and allocate resources for their core mission of serving the students and families in Michigan. MiSci shared how they believed the bronze statue, which blended the past with the present by combining ancient metalworking techniques with modern technology, was a brilliant STEM story. As the STEM hub of Michigan, MiSci hopes to support Imagination Station by locating the perfect home for their iconic sculpture.
