Ralphael Plescia, who died earlier this month, spent 50 years creating artwork, based on Bible passages, in a Salt Lake City building he called Christian School.
, which chronicles offbeat landmarks, notes that the building contains “huge, larger-than-life statues of Eve and the serpent in the garden, the lion of Judah, dragons, Heavenly Mother and other figures [that] emerge from the very floor.”
When another daughter, Tammy, died in 2009 of an aneurysm, Plescia was devastated, his wife said in the video. “The loss has really made him think about things more deeply,” Rae said., wrote that the work in his Christian School was inspired by the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelation. That chapter describes a pregnant woman confronted by a seven-headed dragon preparing to devour the woman’s child when it is born.
“Self-taught with no formal sculpture or restoration training, he studied lions through books and observed them during visits to Hogle Zoo,” Angelides said. “He not only repaired them, but altered them to make them more anatomically correct.”by the 1977 session of the Utah Legislature, which cited his efforts in “restoring the magnificence to the pride of lions which grace the East and West entrances to the Utah State Capitol building.
As a child, according to Spaces Archive, Plescia would play in the Gilgal Sculpture Garden, and watch the mason Thomas Child build the sculptures that depicted aspects of his faith — such as the famous Joseph Smith sphinx. “All of these have important sorts of literary or religious folk life, [they’re] regular people’s interpretations of religion or art, and are important in terms of what they represent,” he said.
Rae Plescia said in the 2016 video that the Christian School building goes to the Shriners Children’s Hospital after his death. The Plescias had been leasing it from the Shriners hospital, which is still the building’s owner,In the 2016 video, Huffaker — when he was still with Preservation Utah — said the building, because of its prime location on State Street, could be a target for redevelopment.
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