BIOGRAPHY
Erik Blome is an accomplished sculptor with works that dot the nation. Erik attended the University of Michigan where he earned a B.F.A. in Fine Art. He received his M.F.A. in sculpture from Boston University. Subsequently, he received a Rotary Scholarship and did postgraduate work at the Royal College of Art in London, England, where he received a postgraduate diploma in sculpture and drawing. Erik has taught sculpture, bronze casting, public art and drawing at several colleges and art schools, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Academy of Art in San Francisco, and the Royal College of Art in London. He was a visiting artist at the American University in Cairo in 2009, and artist-in-residence at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia in January 2011 where he built a fine art bronze foundry. In the summer of 2011 he was artist-in- residence at the City of Oak Lawn, Illinois where he had a temporary studio set- up to create a 9/11 first responders monument using large steel beams from the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York City. Erik was a U.S. Fulbright Teaching Award Recipient for 2011-12 with affiliation at the sculpture department of Helwan University in Cairo, Egypt. He recently completed a life-size bronze sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. for the island of Bimini in the Bahamas unveiled by Prime Minister Christie and a bronze figurative portrait of Eli Lilly, for Lilly headquarters in Indianapolis. Currently he is working on 14 over life-size bronzes for Air Canada Centre in downtown Toronto, Canada and a life-size figure of Appellate Court Justice Laura Liu for Chicago's Chinatown.