Where does an artist who sculpts history’s most prominent women start?
“The heart is where I begin,” says Loveland sculptor Jane DeDecker. “Sometimes I'll even layer that area so that you can kind of feel and maybe see where the heart lies.”
In a sun-soaked barn perfect for keeping clay warm and malleable, DeDecker is working on a figure who had a lot of heart in real life.
Singer and dancer Josephine Baker was a Renaissance woman. A global superstar. A civil rights activist. A mother to a “rainbow tribe” of 12 adopted children. A spy for the French resistance.
But DeDecker makes her figures accessible.
“I call it tangible greatness, where these great women are on the level where you can relate to them.”
DeDecker has sculpted Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, and Emily Dickinson, among others. Her likeness of Baker will sit on a bench near Baker’s former home west of Paris — inviting the living to sit beside her.
Jane DeDecker sculpts Josephine Baker. 
Jane DeDecker sculpts Josephine Baker.
A century ago, Baker fled the United States for France, where, as a vocal Black woman, she found greater freedom and fame. DeDecker’s piece, titled Timeless Grace, marks the occasion in all the fluidity of clay, then bronze.
“I wanted her to be active. Her whole life was accomplishments. So I wanted her just in a rocking movement. She's alive. I think she's almost barely tethered to this earth because she was fluid, and here and there,” DeDecker mused.
DeDecker, best known for the national women’s suffrage monument, was enlisted by the Josephine Baker Commemorative Site for this project. The sculpture site is located in a parkway in Le Vésinet, France, paces away from Baker’s beloved Villa Beau-Chêne.
“It's an honor for me to sculpt someone and I take it very seriously. Sometimes I ask permission. I'm like, ‘if you're out there, come here and visit, be with me. Let me bring you back for everyone.”
