On International Sculpture Day, celebrating art in NOAA’s front yard

Raymond Kaskey chuckles softly when he is told that some people call his statue “The Hand of God.”

“I’ve heard people say things like maybe it's Noah’s hand. The one from the Bible and the flood. It's kind of a funny play on words, in that way,” he says. “But that would not be appropriate in regards to NOAA’s mission.” 

When creating the huge piece to sit outside NOAA’s Silver Spring, Maryland campus offsite link, Kaskey wanted to create a landmark. The new buildings had been criticized as boring and monolithic. A writer with the Washington Post offsite linkeven called them “uninspired and uninspiring” a few years after the campus opened in 1990. 

But the bronze sculpture, installed in 1991 and officially named the Hand of NOAA, was praised for its warmth, humanity and appeal and was heralded as an important part of “a delightful sequence of public spaces” included in the complex. 

“I wanted it to be making a kind of welcoming gesture to invite people in,” Kaskey recalls now, many decades later. “People couldn’t ignore it, even when they were driving by.” 

Kaskey was in his early forties when he created the Hand of NOAA. Sculpting became a second career after he left the field of architecture. He was hired to do the piece after winning a competition.

It wasn’t the first time he’d done a large-scale installation. His statue Portlandia was the country’s second largest copper statue after the Statue of Liberty. Kaskey notes with pride that the piece eventually became the namesake of the popular TV show and was included in its opening credits. It still sits outside of Portland, Oregon’s public services building. 

After the Hand of NOAA, Kaskey went on to design the copper eagles and laurels that decorate the World War II Memorial in the National Mall in D.C. He also designed the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in D.C.’s Judiciary Square. 

Kaskey used his own hand as a model for the NOAA piece. Originally, the sculpture also included an operational fountain with water splashing upwards like a cuff of waves around the wrist. However, the water was removed in 2005 after a pipe corroded and the parking garage underneath was inundated. 

Now, instead of water, the fountain’s basin holds several boxwood shrubs and some flowers planted in soil, which is in accordance with the building’s Gold LEED status offsite link. 

Kaskey continues to create today from the same studio space he used back in the 1990s. 

“I try to do something that’s relevant to the narrative or the mission of the agency in a way that would be understandable without a lengthy explanation,” Kaskey says about his sculptures. “Public sculpture ought to grab people.”