Sharon BuMann isn’t retired. She wants to make that clear. On Thursday, she will receive the Onondaga Historical Association medal — the highest individual award that organization presents for contributions to civic heritage — during a breakfast at the Syracuse Marriott Downtown.
When she accepts, it will be as a working sculptor.
“I’m still an artist,” she said, “and I look out at some of these things, and I don’t even know I’m here.”
She referred to being lost in her art, which she described as an every-sense-at-once process that begins with the mind, long before touching hand to clay or canvas. A massive stroke might have taken away the use of her right hand, but it hasn’t changed how she envisions her artistic starting point.
Every day, she sees dramatic elements in the world that she would love to put to bronze.
BuMann, 71, gestured toward the window at the Brookdale Bellevue memory care home in Taunton, where she lives while in recovery. She studied new leaves in the maples, glowing with that luminous early-in-May green. She observed the expressions of fellow residents, sitting outdoors with their faces lifted toward sun and sky.
Retirement?
Even when BuMann sleeps, she dreams of art.
In Central New York, BuMann is one of the great public sculptors of the past half-century. “She’s captured so many iconic moments that she herself is now iconic,” said Robert Searing, the OHA’s curator of history.
Thursday, BuMann will be among three recipients of the medal, the greatest OHA accolade. Medals will also be awarded to the Syracuse Downtown Committee for its longtime commitment to historic revitalization, and to the partnership between Franklin Properties, MacKnight Architects, and MCK Building Associates, “whose innovative partnership,” the OHA says, “has reimagined historic spaces.”
For the event to fall just before Memorial Day intertwines with the soul and purpose of BuMann’s work: She’s restored many renowned Syracuse statues that honor sacrifice and loss, including the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Clinton Square and the Rock of the Marne memorial at Billings Park, among the most meaningful World War I memorials in the nation.
Yet it is BuMann’s original sculptures — their whole purpose as loving and aching public memorials — that make her a legendary artist in this region.
Her most famous project is the Jerry Rescue monument, at Clinton Square. It portrays the nearby 1851 jailhouse breakout of William Henry, often called “Jerry,” whose flight from enslavement was seemingly doomed by his arrest in Syracuse, under the Fugitive Slave Act.
The monument — dedicated almost 25 years ago — was the dream of the late Chester Whiteside, the city’s first Black firefighter and a longtime voice of civic conscience. He and BuMann worked together closely, with a stirring result: Searing said the power of the memorial lies in the eternal intensity of the moment when Henry goes free, in the way the statue enshrines that desperate emotion.
“I wanted to portray the very essence of who he was,” BuMann said.
She also designed the sculpture at the heart of the Libba Cotton Grove, where the American folk music legend — a lefthander who learned to play an upside-down guitar — maintains a perpetual watch on the Syracuse skyline, from the city’s South Side.
The Mountain Goat Run monument on the round-top at Onondaga Park, one of the great civic tributes to running in the nation, is also a BuMann commission. She was first told about the project by Brendan Jackson, her running coach at Fleet Feet Syracuse, a vibrant and inspirational guy whose sudden death in a race occurred only days before that statue was dedicated.
Before designing that statue, BuMann traveled to visit her son, accomplished wildlife sculptor George Bumann, at his home near Yellowstone. Together, mother and son observed the movements of mountain goats in the wild.
Of the elements of life that go into each sculpture, BuMann said simply: “There are so many things.”
For decades, she built her routine around each new job and project, until that trajectory was jolted four years ago. BuMann has longtime ties to the Fort Brewerton Museum, its creation intertwined with her late father’s commitment to history. She was outside hanging Christmas lights, her dog in the car, when she suffered the stroke.
BuMann spent a frigid night on the ground, until she was rescued the next morning. Survival, her son said, was no sure thing. Once out of crisis, BuMann had to relearn almost every task we take for granted: How to speak. How to write and draw left-handed, without use of what had always been her primary hand. How to learn to live while maneuvering in a motorized wheelchair.
“The doctor was not convinced she’d make it,” George said. “I told him, ‘You don’t know my mother.’”
BuMann’s intellect, George said, is as fierce and piercing as ever. His mother offers particular gratitude for the support of George and his sister, Amy Eustace, who lives near Buffalo — and for the help from BuMann’s sister Mary, a frequent visitor.
The right side of BuMann’s body still doesn’t respond. She speaks bluntly of occasional challenges with her memory, and she described how even the act of conversation — the process of transforming the concepts she sees so vividly in her mind, into spoken words — demands a kind of focused, step-by-step and often tiring mental discipline.
In that sense, she draws on everything she learned in each meticulous step of detailed sculpture.
While her last major project occurred before the stroke, her recovery itself becomes inseparable from her artistic purpose, and BuMann makes this promise: “I have not done my end piece.”
Lisa Romano Moore, executive director of the OHA, said Thursday’s ceremony was inspired by BuMann’s ongoing recovery. “Sharon has captured so many people and moments and historical events in such a beautiful way, in a way that moves us,” Moore said.
The decision to award her the medal was made in 2020 by the organization. But the pandemic froze everything, and a year later BuMann endured the stroke. “We were devastated by it,” Moore said of BuMann’s struggle, and the OHA put the idea on hold until it was clear BuMann could be there, to accept in person.
The key moment was in autumn 2023, when Mayor Ben Walsh and other city officials observed “Sharon BuMann Day” and honored her at the Jerry Rescue monument.
“We knew then we could do it,” Moore said, “and she could join us in the celebration.”
Moore sees the timing as particularly important. In a digital era when falsehoods often spread like wildfire, Moore said the unchanging resonance and integrity of BuMann’s work matters as a statement of lasting truth in a period “when history can so easily be lost or misconstrued.”
While the honor centers around her sculpture, BuMann said that discipline was not her first artistic love. She’s spent most of her life in the Big Bay area, near Oneida Lake, where as a child she began sketching horses, as they grazed. After high school, at the old downtown campus of Onondaga Community College, an instructor named Jim Cody spotted her talent in art class.
His encouragement, she said, changed her life.
“My great beginning,” BuMann calls it, because she left OCC for Syracuse University and the tutelage of the late Roger Mack — an internationally renowned sculptor who inspired generations of artists.
“Roger had a different way of working,” BuMann said. “He saw (a sculpture as) alive, and then he had you merge everything into it.”
Do it right, combine nuances of motion with instants of passion — and the inference of reflection — and you give the world immediacy in bronze, eventually conveyed from your hand into that metal.
Her first sculpture, BuMann said, “was of two horses, fighting.” After college, she shifted into the statuary that would make her famous. In addition to her work in bronze — as well as some beautiful cemetery monuments — she became a master at the more playful form of butter sculptures, not only as a hometown favorite at the New York State Fair in Syracuse but at state and county fairs across the nation.
Put on the spot about a favorite piece, she chose a statue of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a groundbreaking surgeon who earned the Medal of Honor for selfless courage during the Civil War. BuMann portrays Walker at a podium, leaning forward and seemingly ready to speak, just outside Oswego Town Hall.
“She has a whole air about her,” said BuMann, a student of the women’s rights movement in Upstate New York. She always does deep research on the subjects of her work, and she felt particular love and admiration for Walker’s refusal to be constrained by the harsh boundaries surrounding women at that time.
At Brookdale, BuMann casually describes her room as her studio. When she wakes up every morning, she reaches toward several small clay models of figures she’s sculpted in the past. The stroke forced her to do everything with her left hand — though she learned so swiftly that she’s already done a detailed pencil sketch, a portrait, that she might someday put to clay.
In essence, the discipline of sculpting — the patience of understanding that painstaking goals can often take years to reach — becomes training and template for her own recovery.
She speaks with lasting gratitude of her late husband, George, who died at 52 and was always a devoted supporter of her work. She is appreciative of her children, her sister and the friends who have stuck with her in recent years — the ones who realize she still sees the world as she always has. She and her son George daydream about the possibility of someday collaborating on a piece.
All of it led BuMann to restate her central point, with emphasis: Despite the stroke, she isn’t contemplating retirement. One of the great testaments to her work — one that made sudden tears rush to BuMann’s eyes — was provided not long ago by Charlina Davis, a medical tech at Brookdale who lived for decades at Croton Terrace, within the Syracuse housing development known as Central Village or “The Bricks.”
That’s just across the street from the Libba Cotton Grove, with its bronze centerpiece sculpture of Cotten, guitar in her arms. For Davis, that sculpture was part of the neighborhood landscape. It was only recently, in conversation with BuMann, that Davis realized:
“She was the one who made it.”
Davis offered the thought with such awe and gratitude it made BuMann cry, which she might want to see as preparation: Those same emotions, multiplied by an entire community, are the true gift for BuMann Thursday, once her hand touches that medal.
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