Jo Davidson
Jo Davidson was born in New York on March 30, 1883. He made the figure of Gertrude Stein that was cast as a statue and installed in Bryant Park in 1992 and the bust of Fiorello LaGuardia, dedicated in 1957, that is in a playground near Cherry and Madison Streets on the Lower East Side.
He attended the Art Students League in New York and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also worked in New York at the Bryant Park Studios.
He is credited with scores of public monuments; more than 200 are catlogued by the Smithsonian, including the statue of Walt Whitman in Bear Mountain State Park, the statue of Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, the statues of Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln in the collection of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, etc., etc., etc.
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery opened a permanent exhibition in 2006, "Jo Davidson: Biographer in Bronze", featuring 14 of his sculptures.
Davidson died Jan. 2, 1952.
