Sculptor’s work reveals his view of the world

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By day, 91-year-old Riverdale resident Jay Moss worked in commercial art, as head of NBC’s TV Art Department and as a lighting designer for stores like Bloomingdales and JC Penney. 

But by night, he was a sculptor, crafting dozens of pieces out of metal alloys and wood scraps in his basement studio. 

Over 40 of the artist’s pieces are on view in Manhattan College’s O’Malley Library until Dec. 16, in an exhibit called Sculpture and Social Consciousness

“I’m liberal by instinct,” said Mr. Moss on Oct. 24, as he stood in front of a sculpture called “The Oscar for Torturers,” crafted in 2009.

The piece, a metal statuette resembling an Academy Award, with a gold chain around its neck that extends down to handcuffs at the statue’s wrists, was inspired by the abuse at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration. It was intended as a sarcastic award for Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. 

“I want to award them this [piece]… in a farcical way,” he said. 

Many of his pieces are influenced by his time serving as a combat engineer in Europe during World War II. 

He and his fellow soldiers built roads and pontoon bridges as they traveled through the Vosges Mountains in France. He recalls seeing the bodies of deceased soldiers being transported back from battle on those makeshift “corduroy” roads, many of them still clad in the knitted caps he and his fellow soldiers wore underneath their steel helmets. 

“That’s an image I’ll never forget,” he said. The memory was too horrific to use explicitly in his work, he added. 

Pieces like “Stalag Theater,” however, created in 1981, do not shy away from the horrors of the war. Crafted from zinc-lead alloy, it depicts three painted, silhouetted figures marching to their ends through a prisoner-of-war camp, tattoo-numbers hanging from barbed wire over their heads. 

It was Mr. Moss’s regiment, though not Mr. Moss himself, that liberated Dachau at the end of the war. 

“When I got out of the army, nobody talked about the war,” he said. “But 20, 30 years later, it all came out. In my psyche, evidently.”  

Jay Moss, Manhattan College, Art, Sculpture and Social Consciousness, Sculptor, Maya Rajamani
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