Biography
Robert Shure was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1948, and from an early age he had a love for art and spent many hours drawing. Through elementary and high school, he received several awards for his creative artwork. In 1966, he entered the New York Institute of Technology as a Bachelor of Fine Arts major. He graduated in 1970, cum laude, and received the “Gold Medal in Sculpture Award.” This medal is given as the highest honor in sculpture by the New York Institute of Technology each year. In 1970, he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University with a scholarship. He received a Master of Fine Arts for sculpture in 1973 and graduated cum laude. His original sculptures were shown at several Boston galleries including The DeCordova Museum and The Institute of Contemporary Art.
Upon graduating, Shure became an assistant at the traditional sculpture studio of Arcangelo Cascieri and Adio di Biccari. They were both internationally-recognized designers and sculptors who worked out of their historic studio on Tavern Road in Boston. Mr. Cascieri was also the Dean of the Boston Architectural Center. From the early 1970s through the 1980s, Shure helped to produce many of the public monuments, sculptures, memorials, and restorations completed at the Cascieri-di Biccari studio. A few of the hundreds of projects to which he contributed were creating sculptures for the National Cathedral, the conservation and restoration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s original plaster of Amor Caritas, the restoration and reproduction of Daniel Chester French’s Concord, MA Minute Man, and many models, molds, and reproductions for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Shure became involved in all the specialties of the sculpture studio including designing monuments and portraits, armatures, mold-making, casting in plaster, architectural ornament, and conservation and restoration of plaster, stone, and bronze. As Mr. Cascieri and Mr. di Biccari gradually retired, Shure continued the tradition of the sculpture studio. Also, through working at the Tavern Road studio, he met Lino Giust, who was a good friend and colleague of Mr. di Biccari. Mr. Giust was another Italian artisan who immigrated to the Boston area and was a master mold-maker, plaster caster, and plaster conservator. Upon his arrival in Boston, he purchased P.P. Caproni and Brother, which was one of the finest studios in the world that produced and restored plaster casts. Shure extended his training by working directly with Mr. Giust. Mr. Giust was of the same generation as Shure’s other two mentors and retired at the same time. He passed on the Caproni company to Shure.
In 1990, Shure combined both the Cascieri-di Biccari studio and the Caproni company into a new studio at a new location in Woburn, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest and most active studios of its type in the country. The studio works with a worldwide clientele of committees, museums, institutions, government bodies, and architects. Continuing the tradition, Shure’s studio, staffed with assistants and artisans, is actively working on many diverse and significant sculpture-related projects. Such work includes the conservation of antique sculpture and monuments and the restoration of sculptural elements on historic buildings such as the Old State House in Boston and the Washington Monument in DC. Shure restored three Renaissance fountains at the Elms for the Preservation Society of Newport County in Rhode Island, for which he received the Society’s 2005 Laurel Award. Additional projects include the restoration and replication of the sculpture at Johnson Park at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, and the restoration and replication of two heroic sized rhinoceros sculptures originally created by Katharine Lane Weems for the Bronx Zoo. A few of Robert Shure’s public sculptures and monuments are the Protectors of the American Family in Norwood, Massachusetts, the Cy Young Memorial at the site of the first World Series in Boston, the Sigmund Freud statue at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the General John Stark statue at the Bennington Battle Monument in Vermont, the Joe DiMaggio Memorial at Yankee Stadium, the Massachusetts Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Boston, the Arnold “Red” Auerbach Portrait Relief at Boston’s North Station near the TD Garden entrance, the Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial in Providence, and the Strand Theatre Fire Memorial in Brockton, Massachusetts.
Shure and Skylight Studios received the 1995 Federal Design Achievement Award – part of the Presidential Design Awards presented by the National Endowment for the Arts – for his heroic-sized relief sculpture of George Washington in the Washington Monument. He recently completed a sculpture for the Museum of Science in Boston depicting the Washburns who were the founders of the Museum, a sculpture of the University of New Haven’s horse mascot for its campus in Connecticut, and the Puerto Rican Veterans Memorial in Boston. Of late, he has completed a series of sculptures for the American Village in Montevallo, Alabama and a monument for Worcester, Massachusetts depicting the engineer and the contractor of the Blackstone Canal. At this time, Robert Shure has accumulated over 40 years of hands-on experience working in the field of sculpture.