Raymond, Leona Evelyn (1908–1998)

Leona Evelyn Raymond is remembered for the large architectural sculptures she designed and named for such virtues as love, family, and peace. For sixty years, she taught workshops and classes, creating a community of novice and professional sculpture artists who dubbed her Minnesota’s dean of women sculptors.

Evelyn Raymond, who went by her middle name, was born in Duluth and grew up in a creative family that worked hard for a meager income. She learned early that what she didn’t have, she could make. Even as a small child she fashioned toys from twigs and whistles from willows.

Her art education began with an innovative program connecting Duluth high school students with Columbia University instructors, providing classes in drawing, pottery, metal work, and art history. After completing high school, Raymond attended the Minneapolis School of Art, where she experimented in abstract and modernist sculpture. She is said to have produced the school of art’s first abstract sculpture.

A few years into her studies, however, she was called back to Duluth to care for her ailing mother and to help raise a younger brother and sister. For eight years, she supported her family by working as a cook on a dairy farm near Duluth, but she produced no artwork. It was only after her mother’s death in 1938 that she felt she could resume her life as a Minneapolis artist.

Clement Haupers, director of the Minnesota division of the WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP), remembered her initiative and her work at the school of art, and he agreed to hire her if she could prove she was still able to create sculptures. Raymond responded to the challenge by constructing a twenty-inch-tall, gray plaster figure she named Erg, meaning “a unit of work or energy.” The statuette was constructed as a collection of tools and body parts, coming together in the form of a brawny humanoid––part man, part robot. Haupers hired Raymond, and within a year he appointed her to head the FAP sculpture department, which moved into the Walker Art Center’s new community art school.

As an FAP instructor, Raymond’s responsibilities included teaching and creating three-dimensional works for post offices, schools, hospitals, and other public buildings. Her first major assignment at the FAP was to construct a large bas relief sculpture for the high school stadium in International Falls. It was a significant departure from the Erg figure: while Erg was measured in inches, this mural would be twelve feet by eighteen feet. It was more complex, featuring seven muscular athletes emerging from a cement frame. Tiny Erg was created within three months, while the Bronco Stadium relief was under construction for nearly three years. Both sculptures offered proof that she could still sculpt, and both demonstrated her range of media and style. 

FAP funding ended in 1943, and the program closed. Raymond remained as a teacher and head of the Walker art school’s sculpture department through the transition, with the continued charge of conducting classes and workshops and developing her own sculptures. Her work was often experimental, combining modernism with cubism and realism with abstraction. In her own works, she designed pieces she believed viewers could relate to; in her teaching, she encouraged students to create for themselves. 

In 1950, the Walker Art Center shut down its art school, and Raymond lost her job. Almost overnight, she launched Minnesota’s first “all-sculpting school,” which came to be known as the Evelyn Raymond Clay Club. For the rest of her life, she supported herself by combining teaching with sculpture commissions large and small. She created a community of sculpture artists by offering classes for children, high school students, and adults, then celebrating their work in exhibits staged in local cafes, libraries, shops, and, once, in a barn in Hopkins.

Several of her large sculptures remain in situ in the 2020s, most notably her seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Maria Sanford, the University of Minnesota’s first woman professor. The Sanford statue is one of two statues representing the state of Minnesota as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, DC.