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Antique Mayan platters mix with Rubin Peacock’s bronze maquettes (scale models); on the table, his 1974 bronze, "Mooncow," and a Guatemalan Mountain Indian vase filled with sunflowers.
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Peacock, in his Jackson Ward studio, completing the modeling details for a commissioned bronze sculpture
Rubin Peacock has a thing for buildings with a history.
The renowned sculptor has preserved a number of derelict structures to use as living, studio and gallery spaces since he arrived in Richmond in 1967 to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts from VCU School of the Arts, then Richmond Professional Institute.
“I have a thing about saving things,” says Peacock, who has amassed a museum-caliber collection of Mayan, Aztec, Olmec and Zapotec pottery, rugs and handcrafted idols since his first visit to Mexico in 1965. “Collecting is a passion for me.”
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On the roof garden, a table covered in Zapotec Indian rugs displays maquettes including one for Peacock’s "Untitled Totem," 2011, in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection.
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The artist’s father made the miniature pie safe for him as a gift. The painting is Peacock’s own creation.
Peacock traces his affinity for historic buildings and collecting to family drives along the back roads of North Carolina when he was a boy. His parents, he says, were always looking for fields to search for Native American relics, and exploring abandoned houses, barns and stores. Many had stood vacant since the Depression or World War II, as country residents flocked to cities.
“Throughout my life, historic buildings seem to appear almost magically, presenting irresistible opportunities for developing interesting living and studio space,” Peacock says.
One of few sculptors known to have cast his own large-scale bronze works throughout his career, Peacock was the first Virginia artist to be represented in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ sculpture garden. Locally, his work is also included in the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, Blanton Gallery at Longwood University and VCU art collections, at the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, and in numerous corporate and private collections.
“For me the process of renewal involved in restoring old buildings parallels the creative process of making art,” he says. “I am energized by both — like my art, these spaces became products of my imagination and my own labor, providing me with suitable environments for the ever-changing direction of my art.”
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In Peacock’s North Side living room, an antique Jamaican Campeche chair — bequeathed by his friend, Ambassador Thomas Wilson Beale, whom Peacock met while serving in the Peace Corps in the 1960s — mixes with a primitive East Indian cupboard, a vintage Chinese lacquer cabinet, Amazon River Shipibo ceramic bowls, a bronze maquette for one of the artist’s large-scale sculptures and pieces from his collections. Seen through the door is a clay sculpture of Xochipilli, the Aztec god of art, games, beauty, dance and song.
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American antiques and a display of unique handcrafted Mayan idols in Peacock’s Jackson Ward studio
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In the foyer, a funerary urn from the classical Mayan period guards Native American pottery from the Southwest.
He looks for places that have retained evidence of a past life, houses that capture his imagination. While driving the back roads of King William County with his brother Roland and wife, Linda, in 1968, he discovered his first gem. Marlboro, an 18th-century Colonial house. It was in a state of ruin, with no windows or doors, but the brick structure was sound. Even so, it captured his heart and soul. He built a studio where he was working by 1969, while the restoration of the house was ongoing.
He traveled to Florida in 1979 to learn new casting techniques, and he purchased an overgrown vacant lot where, over the next few years, he created a studio and foundry; buying, moving and restoring a derelict house and a 1940s metal structure to the property.
In 1985, after a foray to check out the art scene in New York City — which he found distracting and limiting to his creativity — and Washington, D.C. — which he found intriguing — Peacock returned to Richmond. Determined to have a presence in town, he bought an abandoned, pre-Civil War commercial building at the intersection of Brook Road and Broad Street, where he maintains an apartment, studio and gallery.
The building first caught his eye in the late ’60s. “It sat here boarded up [for decades],” he says. “It had so many posters from music events. The whole damn plywood was covered up with pieces and staples. Way at the top there was a sign that said, ‘For Sale.’ The sign looked like it had been there about as long.
“I loved the angle of [the architecture] and the Colonial history of Brook Road … the confluence of the two. And I liked the way it was kind of tucked between two buildings. This building was built first, before the Civil War. Whoever built this building, they set it way back from the road with room for horses and carts; markets like they still have in Europe.”
“Collecting is a passion for me.” —Rubin Peacock
He brought a tape measure and a flashlight to his meeting with the Realtor. “I knew that this exploration would be more like spelunking than touring, and it was,” he recalls. The building was filled with trash and the plaster had come down from the brick walls. Curiously there were no steps to the second floor. When he asked the Realtor how to get to the second floor, the Realtor told him that the building only had one level. “I’m not sure how he missed entire floors, but he did, to my advantage,” Peacock says.
“During World War II, this place was called the Victory supermarket,” he continues, “and they were raising chickens on this [the 2nd floor]. There were no steps. They probably had a ladder at the back to get up here.”
He returned a few days later with an extension ladder mounted on the back of his truck. He parked as close to the building as possible and together with his daughter Corelia, then 7 years old, and his late, ex-wife, Sylvia, climbed to a 2-foot ledge where they could stand safely. They pried the tin off the window for their first look at the building’s second floor. “It was abysmal,” he recalls. Corelia was so dismayed, she asked him not to buy it.
Every square inch of the floor was filled with chicken and pigeon dung, with 2-foot-tall stalagmites where the birds roosted. Undeterred by the mess, Peacock was determined to own the building. For him, he says, it was love at first sight.
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The iron rings in the wall originally tethered horses. The table — covered with a Peruvian rug — and chairs were made in Mexico.
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A 19th-century religious print, hand-painted primitive ladder-back chair from Mexico, Zapotec rug and assorted pottery in Jackson Ward
The restoration took three years. He stripped the interior to the brick, carrying the spent plaster out in buckets; the old lathe in bundles. He built a staircase. To create an open floor plan, he removed walls that broke the second-floor space into three rooms and added a kitchen and full bath; established a roof garden with a painting studio at its back; and placed bedrooms on the third floor. The fireplaces, floors and windows with pre-Civil War bird beak latches throughout the building are original. Peacock says the resulting light-filled space has exceeded his expectations.
Because of the complexity of his work, Peacock now maintains different studios where he can concentrate on specific phases of production — from fashioning a model, to making molds, to finishing — and now casts his pieces at a local foundry. He builds models in a studio just a few blocks away in Jackson Ward in a building that began life as a livery stable and blacksmith’s forge. The roof was caving in on the single-story structure when he found it. After repairing the roof, he restored the interior over a 2-year period and divided it into studio and living spaces; now, there’s a kitchen and sitting area with ample space to display his art and collections, and a full bath, finished with tile purchased on one of his many trips to Mexico.
Five years ago, Peacock sold his Aylett and Florida compounds, moving three tractor-trailer loads of collected antiquities, his bronze sculptures and studio equipment to a 1920s Mediterranean Revival house in North Side that is rich in period architectural detail. Over the past three years, he’s designed and built a studio addition to the existing garage where he now makes his molds; the house and garden are works in progress.