Kentucky Armory Club

ssracer wrote:San Francisco......

Art won't save the world. Volunteer at a Soup Kitchen for fucks sake.
Also, if guns cause crime, do cameras cause child porn?

Coachf wrote:When did it say the docuhes dad was a war veteran? Just said it was in his fathers belongings.

WLJ wrote:Want to bet his "art" is tax payer funded?

Ricker melts guns, turns metal into art
Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 04:00 a.m., Monday, March 17, 2008

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After Heath Maddox's father died unexpectedly in 2006, Maddox was clearing out his dad's belongings when he found a surprise: a U.S. military-issued .45-caliber handgun wrapped in a towel and tucked into a kitchen drawer.

Maddox vaguely recalled a story about his grandfather owning the gun, but he wasn't sure why, or how, it turned up in his father's kitchen.

Yet on a recent Friday evening, two years after the discovery, Maddox stood inside artist John Ricker's San Francisco studio, ready to smash the gun flat with a sledgehammer.

"My uncle wanted to keep it in the family," said Maddox, a planner in the city's transportation agency, before he delivered the first blow. "But I knew about John and what he does with guns. ... I wanted it destroyed."

Ricker's studio, on the eastern edge of Bayview-Hunters Point, is where guns come to die. For the past 20 years, Ricker has collected donated weapons - more than 1,000 by his count - and transformed them into works of art. Initially, Ricker melted the steel and reused it to make city park benches, bike racks and even jewelry. But too few people recognized, much less believed, the metallic furnishings were once hardware made for killing.

"I had to come up with a way to show people that a gun could turn into something positive," Ricker, 48, said as he prepared for the evening's work. "They needed to see it to believe it."
'Gun Coffin'

About eight years ago, Ricker began crafting more explicit works, including a "Gun Coffin," a box-shaped frame composed of distorted guns welded together. The piece includes curving AK-47s Ricker purchased from a Czech arms dealer, a pancake-flat .357 Magnum allegedly owned by Hunter S. Thompson, a .38 Special from a former San Francisco police officer and a pearl-plated pistol once carried by an officer in the Italian National Fascist Party.

"If you have a gun, you have to envision who you're going to kill," Ricker said. "I want people to think about who they think it's OK to shoot, and where that puts them morally."

By the end of that Friday evening, Ricker would add Maddox's grandfather's gun as the coffin's figurative last nail.

Next month, Ricker is towing the 200-pound work to Washington, D.C., where he'll embark on a tour, lugging the piece into public schools in the urban cores of Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. He's also scheduled a stop outside the National Rifle Association's headquarters in Virginia.

At the East Coast schools, just as he has in Oakland and San Francisco, Ricker will use the prop to get students to consider the consequences of gun violence, as well as the simple power of transformation: A gun, after reaching 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, can turn into a daisy at the hands of an artist.

"When children see what we can make out of guns, it blows them away," he said. "They're so used to seeing it used in one way."
'Guerrilla gun bakes'

After the school presentations, Ricker will tote a portable forge and anvil into the toughest neighborhoods and host what he calls "guerrilla gun bakes" - impromptu gatherings where anyone in the neighborhood can donate a gun and help recast it into art. Ricker heats up the guns and lets the neighbors take a few whacks.

A few years ago, Ricker showed up at San Francisco's Bryant Elementary School two weeks after a mother had been killed in a nearby shooting; she left behind two fifth-grade sons, and Ricker let the two brothers take the first strikes. The two boys immediately started weeping, he said.

"Then the whole class started crying," Ricker recalled. "But that was good. That's what they needed to express."
Artistic beginnings

Ricker was raised in what was then called the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles and recalls the Watts riots as one of his earliest vivid memories. His father was an NRA member who took him to gun shows.

In his early 20s, Ricker attended a gun show shortly after his father died. He saw arch-conservative groups asking for gun donations, reminding attendees that the Second Amendment guaranteed their right to bear arms and build militias.

Ricker saw this as an exploitation of the constitutional intent; it also mischaracterized men like his father, who owned guns but weren't part of a right-wing agenda.

So Ricker asked gun enthusiasts to donate their old guns to him instead. Within a year, he'd amassed about 200, a reflection, he said, of how many useless guns were out there. In the mid-1990s, there was no legal definition of a "destroyed gun," and to amass such quantities required a dealer's permit, which Ricker had no interest in obtaining. Instead, he helped write a California state statute that allowed him to obtain the first state license permitting gun destruction. Still, he was left with a growing mound of weapons. Ricker had designed furniture in the past, but until he watched a fellow blacksmith at work, he'd never imagined the pliability of steel.

"The art came from the guns," Ricker said, "not the other way around."

He first made a peace sign, using AK-47s circled by handguns, a piece Ricker said, "isn't as effective as the coffin." Around Ricker's studio, milk crates are filled with disarmed and mangled guns awaiting the furnace. He gets weekly calls from Bay Area residents who stumble across his Web site, he said. The guns are mostly donated from people like Maddox, who find a weapon after a loved one's death and don't know what to do with it. The second-most-common donators are mothers who've lost someone to gun violence and want to rid their home of weapons; the third are suicide survivors.
Owners find relief

When gun violence is increasing, as it was in the late '90s, Ricker said he can collect 250 guns in one year. When it's decreasing, he'll receive two dozen. He also makes house calls, and, in one case, he responded to an elderly woman in Oakland who claimed she'd been holding a gun that belonged to a former Black Panther, and was sure the piece was used in a crime. The woman confessed to Ricker she'd held the gun for the Panthers for the past 30 years, a secret she wished to surrender.

But when Ricker took a close look at the tip of the device, it revealed a pinhole barrel, the sure sign it was merely a BB gun.

"But she was relieved, and that's what counts," he said.

Ricker had to stop working for three years after the effects from a cancer diagnosis when he was 29 finally caught up with him, and it wasn't until May 2007 that he'd regained enough strength to blacksmith.

"I'm able to work at a productive pace right now," he said. "I'm ready to leave some beauty behind."

Inside his studio, the instructions he gives Maddox and an assistant are simple: Don't oversmash; 10 to 20 hits will do the job, but if the whacks are too powerful, they'll smear the gun into tiny bits.

Maddox had researched the lineage of his grandfather's gun and learned it was made during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) and was designed to shoot island tribesmen at close range. After he found Ricker's Web site, he saw the gun could be put to another use.

"My initial hope was that it could be used for a bike rack," Maddox said, adding that his father, Tom, was killed while pursuing his passion of bicycling. "I know my father would have liked that."

After Maddox took his swings and Ricker welded it to the "Gun Coffin," Maddox took a few seconds to consider how he felt.

"There's definitely some family stuff coming up," he said. "It's more philosophical than it is emotional. Emotionally, it was a little anticlimactic. But philosophically, I'm glad it's destroyed."

If you'd like to donate your gun to John Ricker, his Web site is: http://www.meltguns.com.

To watch a video of John Ricker at work, go to sfgate.com.