Deaf Profile: Douglas Tilden (1860-1935) PDF

Name _____________________________________ Date ___________________ Class _________ Deaf Profile: Douglas Tilden (1860 - 1935) Called the Michelangelo of the American West, Douglas Tilden had roots in the vibrant and creative San Francisco Bay Area Deaf community,...

Name _____________________________________ Date ___________________ Class _________ Deaf Profile: Douglas Tilden (1860 - 1935) Called the Michelangelo of the American West, Douglas Tilden had roots in the vibrant and creative San Francisco Bay Area Deaf community, and was the first California sculptor to attain recognition and worldwide fame outside the U.S. Tilden was born in 1860, in Chico, California, the second of five children. He became Deaf when he ws four from a bout of scarlet fever. He entered the California School for the Deaf when he was five, and went home insisting that his parents, brothers, and sisters learned to sign. After graduating from the California Shool of the Deaf in Berkeley, California in 1880. Tilden settled into a life teaching at the school. One day, he visited the studio of his brother, a sculptor. “What a wonderful world of new sensation,” he later wrote. “It seemed to suffocate and intoxicate me... plaster casts of masterpieces, dead men’s faces, busts, masses of white stone awaiting cutting... the smell of dampness, unswept floor, marble dust, delightful confusion.” Tilden then began working with clay, but he knew he had to travel to Europe to grow as an artist. He traveled to Paris in 1888 and met his mentor, Paul Choppin, a famed sculptor who was also Deaf. When he exhibited his work at the salon there, his extraordinary sculptures attained wide-reaching celebrity. Tilden’s artistic voice was uniquely capable - in his sculptures, one could feel the distinctive landscapes and the natural majesty of California. After eight years, he returned to California and was received by the community with praise. His work was exhibited along with work from Monet, Rembrandt, and Delacroix. As renowned as Tilden became, his interest in the rights and wellbeing of Deaf people was steadfast. While inParis he became involved in the Deaf community that had blossomed around the Deaf school, and spent time in the Deaf club there. In 1889 he helped organize, and was voted vice president of the International Congress of the Deaf at its first convention in Paris. He proposed a bill to fight the rising tide of oralism, proclaiming at the convention, “Sign language is our language!” Tilden helped organize the California Association of the Deaf, drafting its constitution and bylaws. When Tilden returned to California from Paris, James Duval Phelan, the wealthy mayor of San Francisco and later a United States Senator, became Tilden’s patron. Phelan appointed Tilden to the city’s beautification committee and commissioned him to create bronze statues to memorialize California. His enduring and famous works still stand in beauty and majesty in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. Some of his best known works and their locations are: Mechanics (Market and Battery Streets, San Francisco); the Football Players (University of California Berkeley); the Baseball Player; and Father Junipero Serra (Golden Gate Park). Many famous artists, writers, dancers, and politicians were regular visitors to his little studio in the west end of Berkeley. Tilden was a liely and well-read man, and San Francisco awaited his controversial articles in the daily newspapers. Later, in a time without interpreters or communication technology, he became an art professor at the University of California. When asked how he would communicate with his students, he said “I do not plan to talk to them, I plan to make them work.” Tilden is remembered in the art world as a standard-bearer for the spirit of the American West. In the Deaf community, he is remembered for his activism against the suppression of sign language for educating Deaf children. One of his most famous sculptures, The Bear Hunt, stands on the campus of the California School for the Deaf in Fremont. Tilden died of heart failure and was found dead in his studio in 1935.