A 28-foot Christ and 2,000 plaster models: the Fredericks museum at SVSU

Walk into the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum on the Saginaw Valley State University campus and the first thing you meet is a 28-foot Christ rising up one wall — the plaster original for “The Christ on the Cross” that Fredericks cast in bronze for a cemetery in Indiana. Around it sit roughly 200 more works on display, and behind the scenes the museum holds something rarer: more than 2,000 objects spanning a 70-year career, much of it the plaster models an artist makes on the way to a finished bronze.

Fredericks (1908–1998) was a Detroit-based sculptor whose public works are scattered across Michigan and the country — the kind you’ve probably stood next to without knowing his name. Late in life he and his family gave SVSU his studio archive, plasters, drawings, business papers and all. The gallery opened in the university’s Arbury Fine Arts Center in 1988 and took his name in 1999.

What makes the place worth the drive is that it lets you see how sculpture actually gets made. The plasters show the in-between stage, full-size and chalk-white, before metal and patina hid all the working marks. Outside, a sculpture garden holds more than twenty bronze casts you can walk right up to and touch.

It sits just off Bay Road in University Center, on a campus that’s young by Michigan standards — SVSU was chartered in 1963, the last of the state’s public universities to be founded. Admission to the museum is free. You can spend an hour among the white plasters and the one giant figure on the wall, and leave with a much better sense of what a sculptor’s whole life of work looks like when it’s all kept in one room.