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The “Black Angel,” is a nationally known monument that pays tribute to Ruth Anne Dodge, Gen. Grenville Dodge’s wife.
The sculptor who made it is the same man who crafted the “Seated Lincoln” statue the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
For nearly a century, she’s gazed at the sky in the heights of Lincoln Fairview neighborhood.
“That monument is a world-class treasure,” said Susan Seamands, a former president of the Lincoln Fairview Neighborhood Association. “With that, comes some responsibility.”
Scansite Chief Technical Officer David Bassett’s job is to record and preserve that legacy.
“I love art, and so we get to seeing some beautiful art, and that’s a good example right there,” he said.
The city of Council Bluffs and the neighborhood paired up to hire a California company to record the Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial in three dimensions.
The sculpture was inspired an angelic vision. Bassett used a structured light scanner more than 100 times over two nights.
“This machine is not only doing a 3D scan, it’s doing a photogrammetry session, so what that means is it’s using those markers to align all those scans,” Bassett said.
From every angle, light danced across the angel at night. Bassett spent 18 hours turning art into raw data.
“When we go back to home base in California with the data, we’ll spend days editing it,” he said.
The work is being done to ensure the work of a renowned sculptor keeps her place for another century to come.