Arts ENCORE
From Starving Artist to Mentor
Joshua Diedrich is molding students as well as figures story and photography by
Jay Penny
Left: Dancer Samantha Soltis rehearses Loïe Fuller’s Fire Dance. Above: Michael Arellano holds Timber Sides during a rehearsal of Antony Tudor’s Lilac Garden.
In an industrial area of Kalamazoo's Eastside neighborhood sits
a brick building with loading docks and steel doors. The original construction hints of the city’s industrial age, when such buildings created car parts or repaired heavy machinery. Now the space has half-sculpted rigid-foam sea turtles hanging from its ceiling, several Abraham Lincoln busts made of clay and a giant, concrete 9-foot-tall turn-of-the-century boot. This is 43-year-old sculptor Joshua Diedrich’s studio, where he both creates new works and mentors art students in his apprenticeship programs. 38 | Encore MAY 2017
From left: Joshua Diedrich works on a sculpture in his Kalamazoo studio, one of several Abe Lincoln busts Diedrich has created, and one of his pencil drawings.
Diedrich’s work is primarily as a draughtsman and modeling sculptor. He uses clay to create figures that are then cast in media such as metal and bronze. Diedrich has been interested in the human form and anatomy from an early age and says that he has been drawing naked people since he was 3 or 4 years old and growing up in Paw Paw. He trained in oil painting at the University of Michigan and often includes the medium in his drawings. In the last 10 years his interest in anatomy has developed into an appreciation of capturing animal forms.