Airmail Pilot

The U.S. Post Office Department began its first airmail service between New York and Washington, D.C., on May 15, 1918. International and intercontinental service followed two years later with regular flights between Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, and New York and San Francisco. Early cross-country service included fifteen stops to exchange mail, while pilots changed six times en route. Oronzio Maldarelli’s Airmail Pilot pays tribute to this early era of airmail service. The sculptor depicts a uniformed pilot carrying a neatly packed parachute over his left shoulder. The clean modeling of his voluminous uniform makes him appear sleek and aerodynamic.

Born in Naples, Italy, Maldarelli immigrated with his family to New York in 1905. He worked as a jeweler’s apprentice by day and by night attended painting and sculpture classes at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. He later studied sculpture at the Beaux Arts Institute in New York City, and in 1931 won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study classical sculpture abroad. Malderelli went on to teach at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. Today, his sculptures are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.