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GREENSBORO — Jim Gallucci celebrated his 58th birthday immersed in the largest project of his life.

He long has aimed for such professional heights in his metal sculpting career. If he has a wish, this is it.

"That's the best birthday present any sculptor can have, doing what they love," he says.

But Gallucci barely took time out for a slice of cake.

For eight months, a Gallucci-led team has created four artful 55-foot stainless-steel light towers as the centerpiece for Raleigh's City Plaza.

Now comes the true test: trucking the pieces to Raleigh and tackling the strenuous task of assembling them.

Next will come fabrication of 32 matching bollards, or 42-inch posts, to line the plaza's Fayetteville Street.

The project will bring Gallucci's south Greensboro studio its largest paycheck ever: nearly $2.29 million.

Friends predict that the towers will raise Gallucci's public profile to new heights, perhaps even internationally.

"It puts him in that class of the highest-profile and highest-paying commissions," Reidsville sculptor Brad Spencer says.

"It makes him a player on a bigger stage."

 

Gallucci's stage has expanded during his 33 years of fashioning eye-catching works of metal for homes, businesses and public spaces as far away as Australia.

He's known as the guru of gates -- for his Millennium Gate in the Governmental Plaza, for the entrance to NewBridge Bank Park, for UNCG's baseball stadium gates.

Outside the Airborne & Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, the 23-foot gate he created from twisted World Trade Center steel honors 9/11 victims and heroes.

His benches -- in towns from coast to coast -- invite passersby to stop, sit a spell and chat.

He exhibits at shows around the country, including the famous Pier Walk in Chicago.

Family and friends praise the qualities that have propelled Gallucci through financial and artistic ups and downs.

Talent. Drive. Creativity. Perseverance. Persuasiveness. Inquisitiveness. Geniality.

And especially, hard work.

"He is talented, but a lot of people are talented," says Spencer, Gallucci's student at UNCG in the 1980s.

"He is just like a machine."

Spencer recalls the late internationally known sculptor Peter Agostini, who also taught at UNCG, saying about Gallucci: "I wish I could work as hard as that guy."

While working on a project, Gallucci has his eye out for the next.

"He is always in pursuit of opportunity," says Kathy Gallucci, his wife of 35 years.

On jobs with deadlines, he wants to be very efficient. And when efficiency gets compromised, he gets frustrated, Kathy Gallucci says. "But he works through it."

Outside the studio, the gregarious Gallucci often can be found socializing at art openings and other events, talking about art and problem-solving.

His inquisitive nature spurs him to quiz people behind the scenes about their work, says his daughter, Madeline.

"We will always be the last ones out of a play or event because he's always talking to a janitor," she says, joking.

His influence prompted their children to go into art, Mario in photography and Madeline studying print-making.

"I have glad that they have him as a role model because they see that they can be successful in art," says Kathy Gallucci, who teaches biology.

Mario Gallucci says his father taught him a significant lesson that he applies to photography: Just go out there and make art.

"If you have no pieces, it's going to be hard for people to notice you," his father taught. "If you have 2,000, it's going to be hard for them to ignore you."

Success called for Gallucci to learn much more than artistry.

A few financial hard knocks and the loss of a fingertip in a mishap early on taught him to bone up on business, safety, presentation, design, engineering, equipment and insurance.

Before he puts his hands on metal, he often will draw dozens of sculpture sketches and even fabricate a small-scale model.

A persuasive presentation can mean a larger commission now and more work down the road.

The Raleigh project, for example, started out as a $60,000 project for decorative panels at the base of the towers. The city sought artists' proposals.

Raleigh knows Gallucci's work. It owns his Immigrants Gate II. He designed the gate for its Marbles Kids Museum, a "whisper gate" that enables visitors to communicate through its winding tubes.

Gallucci proposed affordable ideas with an oak leaf theme for the City of Oaks.

Then he suggested more.

The city welcomed his approach. He worked with its engineers, architects and designers. His contract for creating and installing the towers and bollards grew to nearly $2.29 million.

Gallucci spread the wealth, buying from suppliers and providing work for his eight-member staff and subcontractors.

When he needed 20,000 stainless steel oak leaves to decorate screens that will cover tower LED lights, he went to a local waterjet- and laser-cutting business, Exact Cut. It became Exact Cut's largest job to date.

"If you know creative people, a lot of times they have ideas on what they want to do, but they don't know how to get there," owner John Bradley says.

"Jim is not only good at knowing where he wants to get to, he understands the steps to get there."

The towers and bollards will play key roles in a block-long space that will be a street by day, but can be converted to an event venue for evenings and weekends, Raleigh officials say. It will open in late October.

For Gallucci, the towers represent the evolution both of his own art and of public art overall.

"At first, it was placing art in public places," he says.

"Then next was, 'Let's design a work for the space, not just find a sculpture and place it.' Now, it's 'Let's give the art some function.' It's utilitarian but at the same time, making an art statement."

 

Just like the gates that welcome viewers into his art, doors that have opened and closed in Gallucci's life have produced pivotal career opportunities.

"Things open and close for reasons, but we are just impatient," he says. "We want to know the answer today. But we always have to wait."

As a child in Rochester, N.Y., Gallucci learned watercolors from his mother and stone-cutting from his father, who had come to New York from Italy.

But the door to art as a career didn't open until his freshman year at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y.

On the verge of flunking out, he happened by a sculptor's classroom. He peppered her with questions.

"I came back the next day and said, 'This is what I want to do.' "

It gave his studies focus. He topped off his English degree from Le Moyne with bachelor's and master's degrees in art from Syracuse University.

After a brief teaching stint in Alabama, he arrived at UNCG to teach art and run its foundry.

There he gained public notice for projects such as the "Grand Prix de Cardboard," getting students to design and build vehicles from -- that's right -- cardboard.

Carolyn Owen worked on UNCG's grounds crew in the early 1980s when she took Gallucci's metals class to learn to repair equipment. It inspired the Oak Ridge woman, at 40, to become a metal sculptor and a longtime friend.

"In a lot of classes, students create art that looks like what the instructor creates," Owen says. "But Jim encouraged you to find your own style."

Ask why he loves creating art, and it reminds Gallucci of something he occasionally said when creativity clicked with a student: "You saw it. You saw the passion," he would say.

"There is something when you start creating that instills a passion that gets you up every morning."

When UNCG did not renew his contract in 1986, the door seemed to close on a career that he loved.

"Leaving teaching was traumatic," he says, "but it opened so many doors."

He went to work in the Washington Street studio on the edge of downtown that he had opened two years before.

But doors just seemed to keep closing. He lost out on the final cut for sculpture commissions and teaching jobs. "I got 17 second places in six months," he says.

But among them was a commission proposal that would open new territory: metal gates.

He took a job designing exhibits at the North Carolina Zoo. There, he says, "I learned a lot about how to do big projects."

In 1993, he returned to his studio full time.

"We would take on work where we knew it was just fabrication work to make money to pay rent," he says.

Luckily, more cities had begun to focus on adding public art. Gallucci pursued more commissions to create it. His résumé has ballooned to more than 40 public art commissions since.

"I could expand my repertoire of ideas sticking to utilitarian forms but giving them the Gallucci flair," he says.

When his daughter, Madeline, saw metal sculpture that her father had created along a Charlotte bridge, "I saw how just changing handrails on a bridge can change the attitude of a neighborhood," she says.

In 2004, the downtown studio that Gallucci rented was sold. That, too, turned into a blessing.

He bought 3.22 acres on Industrial Avenue and arranged for construction of a 7,000-square-foot, two-story metal prefabricated building.

It has amenities that the old studio didn't: Heat. Skylights. A bridge crane to move large pieces. Two bathrooms. Even a shower.

It also enabled him to do larger-scale pieces, including the Raleigh towers, and to continue his art for decades to come.

Gallucci's business dreams reach higher than the towers.

He talks of someday opening more studios and bringing in a variety of artisans who would create commissioned pieces, as they did in Renaissance Italy.

"I want to create the 'Florence of the South,' " he says.

 

Sun already bakes the ground on this late May morning.

Large sections of the Raleigh towers fill grass outside Gallucci's studio.

He and his crew will assemble a tower upright for the first time. A cameraman for Raleigh Television Network documents the action.

Dressed in his signature uniform of overalls and T-shirt, head covered with a hard hat, Gallucci talks via walkie-talkie to workers on a lift and platform high above. A crane carefully lifts the top into place so that the crew can connect it.

It fits together straight and smooth. Gallucci laughs with delight.

"Look at the size of that thing," he says. "That's as big as those trees back there."

He celebrates by taking his staff to lunch.

A month later, his staff is putting finishing touches on other tower features.

Gallucci demonstrates LED lights behind leaf-covered screens on each tower.

The computer-controlled lights can change from red to green to blue, to rainbows.

"Isn't that cool?" he says.

But on his birthday morning, he's all business.

He checks on workers loading the towers' 15-foot tops.

He's on the phone, settling final details of the move to Raleigh.

And he's wondering why a missing anchor bolt hasn't been delivered yet.

"Jim plans everything, down to the last screw," says his assistant, Jo Boykin.

And when the project calls for 96 anchor bolts, 95 just won't do.

The towers will provide street and event lighting, plus hide electrical panels for plaza power. Visitors can sit on granite bumper seats at their base.

"They will draw a lot of attention and help attract a lot of people downtown," Raleigh project engineer Bob Panella says.

That's the beauty of public art, Gallucci says. It redefines what art can be.

"Part of it is filling a need. They need a light tower. It could be a baseball stadium light or a sculptural presence that becomes an interactive part of the plaza. That's what we are talking about with the power of public art."

 

Contact Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane at 373-5204 or dawn.kane@news-record.com

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