ART DETECTIVES
PHOTOS
Researchers rediscover Picasso sculpture once planned for USF Tampa
Above: Kamila Oles poses with a small-scale wooden model, found in the USF Libraries Special Collections.
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, PABLO PICASSO set out to build a 100-foot-tall sculpture on the USF Tampa campus. It was a dream that never came to fruition, but now an interdisciplinary team is using today’s technology to bring the legendary artist’s vision back to life. “When I first saw the sculpture, I was speechless; I had tears in my eyes,” says Kamila Oles, a researcher at USF’s Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies (CVAST). A longtime Picasso enthusiast, Oles knew instantly that something needed to be done to bring the artist’s vision to the world. The PicassoUSF project began in 1971, when the famed painter and sculptor donated The Bust of a Woman to the university. Sadly, the artist died two years later and the project, which would have been Picasso’s last and largest, never happened. What was left were boxes
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of records and memos, as well as a small-scale wooden model of the sculpture. For decades, these artifacts sat untouched in the USF Libraries Special Collections. “It was just sitting on a shelf and I finally asked after a few years, ‘What is that thing?,’” says Matt Knight, MA ’ 09, director of Special Collections at the library. “Hopefully, that question helped the story come back out again. Then Kamila showed up and like a ray of sunshine she said, ‘Let’s start digging into these boxes. Let’s figure out what’s going on.’” Acting as part archaeologist, part art historian and part detective, Oles and Knight began digging through the archives, piecing this story back together. Using her extensive knowledge of CVAST’s visualization and 3D virtualization tools, Oles also began work to build Picasso’s sculpture in virtual reality. “It’s very exciting because we are really the next artisans in this project,” says Oles. “I believe that Picasso would be very enthusiastic about our virtual reality methods and our new technologies. It’s really amazing to be able to recreate his forgotten desire after 50 years.”
Opposite page, top: A rendering from the early 70s shows how The Bust of a Woman would appear on campus. Opposite page, bottom: Matt Knight, director, and Oles, in the Special Collections at the USF Tampa Library.
View a video: “Found Audio at USF”