Friends unveil bronze bust of community leader Barbara Curry

Speakers captured the spirit and strength of Barbara Curry Thursday, during a ceremony held to unveil a bronze bust of the popular community leader.

Curry, founder of Women that VOTE! (now Women that VOTE Arts Corporation), died of cancer in August 2022 while she was in the middle of multiple projects, including a run for public office and coordination of the Celebrating Suffrage monument. She already had a long track record of helping others in the community when she took on the task of creating an organization designed to get women involved in politics and the election process, and it was the members of that group that coordinated Thursday’s ceremony.

Members also made the decision to drop plans for the suffrage monument, instead deciding to ask Tulsa sculptor Denise Ford to craft a bronze bust of Curry. Ford was in the audience Thursday for the ceremony and afterward said the work wasn’t a struggle.

“It was easy,” she said, explaining that you know the subject as well as she knew Curry — the two had worked closely on the Celebrating Suffrage project — translating a picture into sculpture wasn’t a challenge.

Ford worked from a picture shot by photographer Chris Martin, a personal friend of Curry’s who was emotional as he told the story of their friendship and how he found the perfect photo for Ford to use. The idea, he said, was to “let the rest of the world know who she was.”

Martin said who Curry was, was a giving woman whose personality was shaped by a difficult life in her younger years. The photo that prompted Ford’s work was in a series that Martin shot and resulted from his directive to Curry to take all the pain in her life, ball it up into her fist, “then let it go.” Martin said he knew as soon as he saw the photograph what he had captured — and so did Curry. In an emotional moment, he showed a video shot that day, revealing Curry’s delighted reaction and full-throated laugh when she saw the photograph.

Curry’s son Anthony remembered a woman determined to help people, and one who wasn’t shy about giving her opinion. That was something Mayor Stan Booker called Curry’s words of wisdom.

“I’ve been getting that all my life,” Anthony Curry said, drawing laughter from the audience.

While she is remembered today for her community involvement, Curry said his mother — a city girl — wasn’t exactly a fan of Lawton when the military family moved here in 1995. He said she found her purpose in 2002 when she began driving a LATS bus, talking to people and trying to solve their problems.

“She was always finding a way to help people,” Curry said, adding while his mother isn’t here physically, she is here in spirit and the bronze bust is a way to embody what she stood for in life.

Jennifer Ellis, one of the Women that VOTE Arts Corporation coordinators, said the bust is to become a piece on display in the sculpture garden that will be created as part of Phase I renovations for Ned Shepler Park. Until that happens, it will be on display in the Lawton Fort Sill Chamber of Commerce office at Southwest 3rd Street and West Gore Boulevard.