There’s an air of ancient Egypt in Hell’s Kitchen, as passersby stop to watch a local artist carve a statue of a sphinx on the neighborhood’s streets.
Dana Nicholson, a self-described Egyptophile, has been enthralled by the image of the legendary sphinx — half woman, half lion or cat — since he was five years old and saw a pair of the mythical creatures outside the entrance to the zoo, while living in Frankfurt, Germany.
Ever since then, “everywhere I go, I try to locate sphinxes,” he said. “They’re all over the world. I think it’s because it’s a metaphor for life.”
As a teenager, Dana decorated his bedroom like an Egyptian tomb. Today, the shelves of his home and studio are lined with books about Egyptian art and culture.
In Greek mythology, the sphinx challenges travelers to a riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two during the day, and three at night? The answer: Man, who crawls on the floor as a baby, walks on two feet as an adult, and uses a cane as an elder. Since its first appearances, the sphinx has been reproduced by cultures across the world, from 18th Century France to Britain.
Dana is a fine artist and interior designer who has called Hell’s Kitchen home for the past 12 years. Since the start of summer, he has spent over 300 hours on the streets outside his home and in nearby Bella Abzug Park in Hudson Yards, sculpting his sphinx out of plaster. Once completed, it will be cast into a dark stone.
Dana started the project with his husband’s encouragement, after discovering that the vintage sphinx statues he had hoped to purchase cost upwards of $25,000. “You sculpt everything, why don’t you just make your own?” he told him. This is the first of three models, which he will render into 15 stone statues, for himself and private clients.
“The sphinx is a mythological creature. No one knows what it really looks like,” Dana said. He’s creating a “nordic,” North American Indigenous sphinx, inspired by the Mi’kmaq Indigenous people native to Prince Edward Island in Canada, where he was born and raised. When completed, its head will feature an Indigenous feather headdress.
“In the beginning I called her Persephone, but then when I got into trouble with her the last couple weeks, I started calling her Eris, the Greek goddess of doom and reckoning,” Dana said, after he used his hammer to remove and redo her shoulders and tail. Sculpting is an intensive process of trial and error — for example, he’s reworked the lips at least 11 times.
Dana sculpts on the street because “plaster work is a very, very messy process.” He’s also a “farm boy [at heart], and as I’ve gotten older I like being indoors less and less.”
It’s also an opportunity for him to interact with passersby, who stop and stare in awe and wonder at the rare spectacle of a man hard at work on a plaster sphinx in a Hell’s Kitchen park.
“There’s a large cross-section of people here. Because of the Javits Center, there’s always a lot of visitors and out of towners,” he said. “And it’s just a friendly neighborhood. I know a lot of people in the neighborhood.”
Sometimes families ask for their picture to be taken in front of the piece. “But it’s not a masterpiece, it’s a garden sculpture,” Dana said. “It’s a sphinx — my sphinx — it’s not Canova, it’s not Bugatti.”
One Egyptian family told him the statue reminded them of home, he said.
Dana has handcrafted many projects in the past, such as the Egyptian-inspired door knobs and wooden frames in his apartment, but never anything on the scale of Eris, his “nordic” sphinx.
He’s still got his work cut out for him, but Dana is confident the next two models will move along quicker than the first.
