An artistry grows in Port Richmond

Beth Kephart

is the author of 14 books, and "Handling the Truth," a book about the making of memoir, is due out in August

I take the Blue Route south and I-95 north. The day is gray and bitter, the lanes too aggressively pocked. Beyond me the Delaware River crawls, heavy with the exhaust of bedlam truckers and implacable with its reminisce of pirates, oil tanks, and whale bones.

At the Allegheny/Castor Avenues exit I veer right, then left toward the heart of Port Richmond. This was collier country once - home to coal traders, but also shipbuilders, cargo holders, and dockhands. The houses are trim. The streets are clean. The bakeries promise Polish sweets, the churches Lithuanian hymns. I park on Allen Street, beneath the rumble of the interstate overhead and alongside the blank stare of former tall-necked warehouses.

The door to Jeb Stuart Wood's Independent Casting is here on Allen Street, sitting high in its frame, unmarked and unlocked. I step up and in to a fantastical world of green filtered light and barrel drums, ceramic cavities and kilns, bronze busts, a primal table, a metal-armed octopus, the roots and hollow of a cast tree stump. Bicycles are strung from wooden beams. Wax slops around in a pot. An orange cylinder blows heat into the chill. There is an exhumation of dust.

Now Jeb himself appears from a room in the faraway back. He has degrees in fine arts and biochemistry, a flannel shirt, a thick plume of hair beneath a modest cap, and he's a foundry man, an artist. Some of the most important artists of our time entrust Jeb and his colleagues with their casts. One of them - Michele Oka Doner - is on her way for a visit from her famous loft in New York City (think Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and the movie Ghosts, and you have seen her loft's facsimile) to check in with a new slate of work.

Michele Oka Doner. If I were reading this aloud I would pause while you Googled her work, her acclaim, her style. I would let you stroll at leisure through her resumé - a word that feels just a tad impoverished when you consider all that she has done. If you've visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Louvre, and the world's great galleries (among other places), you've seen her tattooed dolls and death masks, figurative sculptures, furnishings, jewelry. If you've traveled through the Miami airport, the Ronald Reagan International Airport, the Herald Square subway station in New York City, the Hayden Planetarium, a flagship Tiffany store, the largest luxury mall in Qatar, three U.S. courthouses, or Philadelphia's own Criminal Justice Center, you've been touched by her art; it has touched you.

Michele Oka Doner believes in beauty; she was brought up in beauty's faith. Her father, an intellectual and a lawyer and, for several years, was the mayor of Miami Beach. Her mother, a Latin teacher fluent in many languages, a minimalist, a proponent of good taste.

Michele's childhood was rich with the gifts of the sea, the sound of palm tree rustle, the seizing spark of violent weather, the glamour of seeds and busted pods. She was given the freedom to explore the natural world and the provocation of preambling dinnertime conversation about books, justice, art. From all of that, from so much more, she emerged as a woman endlessly curious and grateful, as a poet-artist who sees herself as a vessel, cites poetry from memory, and named her first son for a river.

When the sculptress arrives in Port Richmond on this cold, gray day, when she enters the foundry (tall, stately, fashion-smart), she is bearing gifts. A box of cookies for Jeb and his artist-foundry cohorts. Two books for me. She looks at once for her pieces in progress and settles in with the radiant disk table, the fourth in this series, which awaits its final touches and will, when it was complete, sit in Michele's own loft home. Ferric will be applied - a light patina. There is a conversation about application methods. Michele listens to what the foundry men say. She suggests and dons a face mask. There is the sound of a flame. There is the focus on craft, the attention to form. "Beautiful!" she says, over the hiss and sometimes silence. "Beautiful. You've done a wonderful job. Not too orange. Just gold, and right."

In time, Michele's attention moves to the stump of a tree that has been cast for a private client in the South. It, too, must be patinated, finished, but now as Michele discusses the possibilities with the foundry artists - liver and ferric? only ferric? - she asks for a brush, pulls on a pair of mismatched gloves, and applies the patina herself, eager to get to the crannies and textures, pleased with what this sculpture has become, what it will be. The stump smokes with the applied heat and chemicals, volcanic. She leans toward it - limber, funny, enthralled, grateful for the care of the Port Richmond artists who have given her work-in-progress a sheltering home.

What does it take to run a foundry in Port Richmond at a time like this? Love for process, Jeb says. Love for handwork. An understanding of the steady momentum gained from positives recalibrated into negatives recalibrated into positives again. It's a little like Port Richmond itself, a place Jeb describes as gratifyingly tight - a little dirt beneath its nails, a lot of pride about its past, a deep consideration for those who live and work here, side by side. Port Richmond is where history lives and where the future beckons to itself.