Adam Popovich and HIs Artistry in Metal

Adam Popovich and HIs Artistry in Metal

In Tamburitza America Milan Opacich includes a section entitled "The Other Lives of Tamburasi: Adam Popovich" (pp. 37-39). It gives an account of Adam's work as a millwright at Wisconsin Steel in South Chicago and of the miniature sculptures Adam loved to fashion from "old bolts, nuts, springs, coils, and other steel remnants." Opacich describes Adam's home as having become "a kind of private gallery and museum of his works, ingenious and fascinating, all made of materials rescued from heaps of scrap metal." He says the sculptures range from a small replica of "working overhead cranes" in a steel mill to miniature tamburitza musicians and tamburitza wall hangings, jungle animals, figures from Serbian history, and a model of an Orthodox church. Opacich includes photographs of six of these (p. 38). Bob Lalich comments that "Adam made all sorts of crests and decorative tamburas out of scrap, which he never sold but gave to those people he liked." Bob himself owned examples.