"That's crazy, I can't believe that—who is that guy?" Dwyane Wade asked the crowd Sunday at the unveiling of his bronze statue in front of the Miami Heat's arena. Who is that guy, indeed. Was Wade a Frasier superfan brought in to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Kelsey Grammer? Was it perhaps a monument to Matrix-era Laurence Fishburne? In time, scholars were able to discern the artists' intent: to commemorate Wade's classic "This is my house" celebration atop a courtside table after a double-overtime game-winner over the Bulls in March 2009.
The statue's posture and garments are mostly true to that iconic Wade moment—he was wearing the El Heat jersey the night of the game-winner, though that's within the bounds of artistic license. The face, less so. That bold massif of a jawline is disorienting when viewed straight on, but it's somewhat more Wade-like when seen from other vantage points. In any case, it was red meat for the Inside the NBA crew on Tuesday's broadcast. Kenny Smith insisted that it looked like Wade, just "making an animated face."
Omri Amrany, co-founder of the studio that made the sculpture, has spoken freely about the statue. His studio's first big sports commission was the Michael Jordan statue erected in Chicago after the Bulls legend's first retirement, and they've been getting steady, high-profile gigs since. Earlier this week, Amrany sought to clarify Wade's rhetorical question to the crowd.
“He knew exactly what he wanted,” Amrany told Front Office Sports in an article published Monday. “He was very happy with the piece. He was joking when he turned around and said, ‘Who is this guy?’ It was like, ‘How did I get here where somebody made a sculpture for me?’ Some people took it like he didn’t recognize his own sculpture, which is completely the opposite. It was just an expression. Sometimes people take the expression literally instead of trying to understand the depth of it.”
In a good-natured if slightly somber press conference on Sunday, Amrany and collaborator Oscar Léon described the process of making the statue, which began in December 2023 and required around 800 hours of work. They created a clay statue in close collaboration with Wade, scanning his face and body to produce a digital model. The resulting clay statue was then cast in bronze, and tweaks were made in the patina of the bronze to highlight certain features of the statue. Léon enumerated the various Easter eggs in the statue: the names of his parents on the soles of Wade's shoes, the addresses of his childhood homes on his wristbands, the finger wrappings, and the gum in his mouth.
"Our responsibility as artists is to look at the muscles, the micro-details, and to think how we can create something that will give the feeling of elimination of gravity, the jumping joy on the table. It's kind of a pretend to be anger, but it's actually kind of fun," Amrany said at the presser. "You have to look at every wrinkle, every muscle, every action, and try to imagine how it will become alive in many ways. That's the difficult part, because it's a frozen bronze forever."
Bronze is a common choice for this type of statue due to its durability outdoors, but Wade last consulted on the project in its clay form. "The clay is the most malleable substance we have in that process. Dwyane was visiting multiple times, and it was the last visit, with the last little tweaks, that he got to see firsthand. After that, we really do trust the process," Léon said, perhaps gesturing at his own basketball bona fides. "The bronze brings out a level of depth and shine, and this vibrancy that you cannot get in the clay. The clay absorbs a lot of light where the bronze has this very nice quality that you just cannot picture what that's going to look like. But we trust the process, and at the end, it's the patina, it's the way that we highlight things, highlight the bronze, that really makes it what it is today."
Léon seemed aware of the public response. “To the critics, there’s a lot that needs to be understood," he said, via NBC News. “We have to seal everything to keep the integrity of the sculpture. However, that does create a funny little side effect of being glossy in areas that we are not used to seeing when we look at somebody in the flesh." I would suggest that it's not the glossiness that is startling viewers, but rather the unexpected Easter Island stylings in the face.
Wade described the statue as "beautiful" in his initial remarks on Sunday, although it was tempting to read something else into the knowing glances he exchanged with his son, Zaire Wade. Amid the widespread disbelief of fans, the Hall of Famer continued to champion the work.
Wade, who has been retired for five years, was given one last defensive assignment on Monday: this statue. In a press conference before the Heat hosted the Pistons, he acknowledged that he had seen the memes, and he still loved the statue, because to him, it was art. “I don’t know a lot of people with a statue," Wade said. "Do you? Anybody here? Y’all know anything about the process of a statue? No one out there do neither." That's kind of a depressing mood in which to celebrate an enduring monument to your basketball accomplishments, but I get it.
“If I wanted it to look like me, I’d just stand outside the arena and y’all can take photos,” the Heat legend added. “It don’t need to look like me. It’s an artistic version of a moment that happened that we’re trying to cement." That wasn't the last word on art criticism. Enough people had clowned the statue that interviewer Jason Jackson alluded to the magnitude of criticism in his halftime chat with Wade during the game.
"[The studio] did an amazing job of captivating exactly what I wanted to portray in an artistic form," Wade said. "It is not a human body that's standing outside. That is art at its finest, and it is incredible." This guy might end up spending around 800 hours explaining why he loves his blockhead statue.
