Meet the sculptor behind the Statue of Responsibility

The Utah artist behind a proposed 300-foot statue that depicts the idea of responsibility said his design is about “coming together” — a concept and an image that, as he puts it, a kindergartner could look at and understand.

“It’s about being there for each other, just on the simplest terms. That’s what I hope people would see in it and remember that it is about,” sculptor Gary Lee Price said.

A nonprofit foundation has proposed erecting the 300-foot Statue of Responsibility at the massive development at the Point of the Mountain, to overlook the Draper location and the commuters traveling between Salt Lake and Utah counties.

The foundation made a presentation in November to the board overseeing the development at The Point, with an endorsement from Gov. Spencer Cox. Foundation officials say the statue, could cost an estimated $350 million to build and maintain, would be funded by private donations — though they are asking for the state to donate 5 acres of publicly owned land at The Point.

The board for The Point has made no announcement of any decision on whether to move forward with the proposal.

Price said his design — two hands each gripping the other’s arm — was inspired by reactions to one of his previous sculptures, “The Ascent,” which he created after he graduated from the University of Utah.

“The Ascent,” he said, depicts two Indigenous people climbing a precipice. (Price said his grandmother has Cherokee ancestry.) The person higher up is reaching down to help the other person climb up.

When he showed that piece in Park City, Price said, people got emotional, and that stuck with him. “That was the absolute initial inspiration of ‘how do I depict responsibility?’” he said.

The link between liberty and responsibility was the idea of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. He first proposed the Statue of Responsibility in his 1946 memoir “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which he also described his experiences at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Price said Frankl’s dream was, to “create a bookend” to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor on America’s western shores. “Frankl said that, ‘We had our freedoms in Austria, Europe, we lost them due to irresponsibility,’” Price said. (The idea was pitched a decade ago, without success, to cities in California and Washington state.)

One of the Americans who took up Frankl’s idea for the statue was the Utah-born businessman and author Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the best-selling “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”

According to Price, it was Covey who promised Frankl, who died in 1997, that he would make the idea of the statue a reality.

Covey’s wife collected Price’s art, so Covey sought out Price to design such a statue. Price created a 17-inch prototype of the statue from stainless steel — an image that, he said, exudes where responsibility starts.

Bill Fillmore, Price’s attorney, encouraged the artist to get approval for his prototype from Frankl’s widow, Eleonore. Visiting Eleonore in Vienna in 2004, Price said, taught the artist something about Viktor Frankl that he didn’t know.

“[Eleonore] took myself and our small entourage up to Viktor’s study, where all these thousands of books are, his desk, everything,” Price said. She pointed out a niche on the bookshelf, he said, where there was a wood carving of a man reaching to the heavens.

“[She said,] ‘Gary, Viktor got that right after he got out of the Holocaust camps at Dachau. He saw it in a market. It meant so much to him,’” Price said. Frankl, his widow said, nicknamed it “The Suffering Man.”

Eleonore, Price said, told him that “One of the things [Viktor] would ask is, ‘Where is the hand reaching down?’” According to Price, Eleonore said, “That’s why your statue resonates with me, is the fact that you’ve answered my husband’s question.”