Seeing Sam Richards' Sculpture

Sam Richards was a prolific sculptor. His experimentation was broad, deep, and lifelong. He was knowledgeable, articulate, and down-to-earth, a man of sparing speech, and personal and artistic integrity. 

Born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1946, he was the youngest of three children. His father was a florist; his mother, a nurse. He spent his boyhood mainly in Berlin, Maryland, a town on the Eastern Shore, not far from Ocean City which was sparsely developed at the time and where, in his teen years, he spent many summers. This was post-war, smalltown life. 

He majored in studio art at the University of Delaware and there began to focus on making welded steel sculptures. He spent a summer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and then two semesters at Tyler School of Art’s Rome, Italy program in between two years at Indiana University in Bloomington where he earned his M.F.A. in sculpture.

At Tyler, he met student Frances Kratzok, whom he later married. Both were fascinated by their surroundings. They enjoyed and valued the search for and discovery of interesting forms, those each invented and those they found: natural and humanmade.

While teaching at the University of Louisville, Richards became ill from a brain tumor in t...