LIBERTY SCULPTURE PARK A
By John Wease
S A RESIDENT OF NEWBERRY SPRINGS, I must make many trips to Barstow, Victorville or “down below” to buy, well, just about everything. I had driven past the Liberty Sculpture Park along the Interstate 15 countless times before I finally stopped in to check it out. The sculptures are quite noticeable from the interstate due to their large size. Up close, they are amazingly detailed and more than a little bit disturbing. All of the art is related to the general theme of fighting for democracy and commemorating the victims of communist oppression. The Sculpture Park is a nongovernmental nonprofit located at 37570 Yermo Road, in Yermo. The thirty-six acres site is largely undeveloped desert with a meandering dirt road that leads to the sculptures along the freeway. And, the art is placed along the freeway to get maximum exposure. With a daily average of 35,000 cars crossing the border into Nevada on the Interstate 15, that’s a lot of exposure. The first sculpture was placed in 2017 and titled “The Origin of Freedom Number One”. It is a fifteen feet high head of Chief Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota Sioux war chief. It was placed on the 140th
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May 2023
anniversary of his death in 1877. A brilliant war strategist, he was finally captured and bayoneted by a guard, reportedly for resisting being placed in a stockade cell. In 2019, the giant 64 sculpture appeared. There was a lot of talk about what “64” could possibly mean. As it turned out, the 30-foot tall 64 represents June 4th, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, China. The base has a relief depicting the clash between the Chinese army and the protestors. In April that year, protestors started gathering in Tiananmen Square and other locations. Mostly university students and factory workers. The Chinese government finally, in the early hours of June 4th, ordered the army to clear the demonstrators from the square. The government, if mentioning the event at all, refers to it as the “June 4th clearing” or the “June 4th event”. It was, technically, a clearing. The square was cleared with the use of automatic rifles and tanks. The number of dead and injured is unknown but, it is believed the deaths were in the hundreds and injuries in the thousands. “Tank Man” was placed the same year. It is a life-sized depiction of the iconic photograph by AP reporter Jeff Widener, shot from his hotel balcony and smuggled out of China. The photograph captured the image of an unidentified man with a
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brief case, standing in front of a column of tanks, leaving Tiananmen Square June 5th. He was never identified and it is unknown if he was ever punished. Many of the protestors were imprisoned. The protest leader that served the longest sentence was Li Wangyang, a labor rights activist. The sculpture honoring Li Wangyang was the next one created, and shows him defiantly standing, arms in chains. He served twenty-one years in prison for