New Deal Legacy

ASU’s most recent public sculpture was dedicated in April 2002. But the New Deal-era art project was actually seven decades in the making.

Titled “Hopi Flute Player,” the 6-foot bronze statue originally was commissioned as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Project. The project lasted only a few months, but it successfully placed thousands of American-themed art works throughout the country. Arizona received 58 murals and paintings—and a design to improve the fountain in front of ASU’s Old Main.

Enter Emry Kopta. Born in Austria in 1884, Kopta studied in Paris and set up a sculpture studio in Los Angeles during the early 1900s. In 1912, Kopta went on an artist’s excursion to the Native American reservations of northern Arizona and New Mexico. When he visited the Hopi mesas, Kopta declared, “This is where I shall work. The people here, especially their elders, possess a great wisdom, which is reflected in their faces.”

Kopta stayed for 11 years, and tribal elders today remember him wandering the villages with a sketchpad. He created such accurate sculptural depictions that their descendants can still recognize them.

Kopta moved to the Phoenix area to complete a war memorial at Phoenix Indian School. He was tapped for the ASU fountain project. Kopta drew inspiration from his many years on the reservation. He designed a cast-stone base that featured four kachinas, then a 6-foot bronze flute player to sit on top. But the Great Depression halted funding for the life-size bronze, and the plaster model eventually was destroyed. The story would have ended there if Anna Kopta, his widow, had not saved a 2-foot maquette of the flute player.

Anna Kopta was named Phoenix Woman of the Year in 1968 for her many years of teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. During the awards dinner, she related the story of the unfinished flute player to Herman Chanen, Phoenix Man of the Year.

Chanen was so intrigued that he offered to have the 2-foot version cast in bronze and present it as a gift to the university. Kopta accepted, and for three decades the statue has been on display in Hayden Library.

When ASU decided to cast the 6-foot version, new technologies, such as digital scanning, made the precise enlargement possible. In accordance with the wishes of the Hopi Tribe, the statue was sited in the more secluded courtyard, rather than the top of the fountain.—Dianne Cripe