Art Worlds
Evelyn Longman’s Genius of Electricity
Public Sculpture as Corporate Icon
Visitors to downtown Dallas now encounter a new sight at the intersection of Wood Street and South Akard: a monumental gilded sculpture of a man with a broad chest and powerful muscles (Figure 1). Heroic in scale, with immense spread wings, the gleaming figure speaks of raw energy. Rising up on his toes, he stretches his left arm upwards to seize bolts of lightning from the sky. Swirling cables curve around his body and terminate in his right hand with a sizzle of electricity. The sculpture is owned by AT&T, Inc., which calls it The Spirit of Communication, with the nickname “Golden Boy.” The company recently moved the figure from inside the lobby of Whitacre Tower to its current outdoor site, where it anchors the south end of the newly opened Discovery District.
This golden hero first entered my life two decades ago, when I was writing my undergraduate thesis on the artist who created him, Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874-1954). Our college museum had just acquired a Victory figure by Longman and a portrait of her by Daniel Chester French, both donated by her family. The prospect of conducting new primary research excited me. I compiled a database of her sculptures and their reproductions that added ninety-four new entries for Longman to the Smithsonian Institution’s Inventory of American Sculpture, and later published a short article on the sculptor’s life and work.1 In graduate school I turned to other projects, but have continued to follow the peregrinations of her best-known sculpture with interest. Because Longman titled her work The Genius of Electricity, and because its every facet bursts with electrical energy, many—myself included—still call it, simply, Electricity.