The Verde Valley’s iconic sculptor John Mark Soderberg died May 13. Family and friends gathered to remember the artist, the father and the man at a celebration of life held at the Sedona Creative Life Center on June 3.
During his career, Soderberg created hundreds of bronze figures, some monumental in scale, others life-size. Many of his works are on display in the Sedona area, including locations in Uptown, the Old Marketplace and the Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley synagogue, and he sculpted works for Amnesty International, Free The Slaves, Big Brothers Big Sisters and other nonprofits and corporations.
Photo courtesy of Pete Galea
Soderberg actively supported domestic abuse shelters and Rancho Feliz Charitable Group, an Arizona nonprofit that builds homes, education and childcare centers and housing in Agua Prieta, Mexico.
He is survived by his daughters, Heather Greene and Misty Soderberg, who are both professional artists and sculptors.
“‘Talent is an invented phenomenon; it does not exist.’ John said this often. He did not believe in talent, which was a hard thing to wrap your head around, coming from this man who sculpted gods.”
Nate Hansen, a student and friend of John Soderberg
Born in Afghanistan
John Soderberg’s father, Richard Soderberg, was a World War II veteran and civil engineer who was hired by King Mohammed Zahir of Afghanistan to be director of the new Afghan Institute of Technology.
Richard and Betty Soderberg traveled to Kabul from India only to discover that they had to physically build the school and hire the staff, not just run an existing campus.
John Soderberg was born in Afghanistan on Oct. 13, 1950, as the third of four brothers: David, the eldest, Paul, who died last year, and Steve, the youngest.
When John Soderberg was nearly 5 years old, the family left Afghanistan to work with the Technical Cooperation Mission in New Delhi, India.
He began painting with his father’s oil paints around that age.
After another five years in India, the family moved to Thailand, where John learned teakwood carving.
The U.S. State Department required Americans living aboard to visit the United States periodically, so the family traveled the world on their back-and-forth trips, visiting dozens of countries along the way.
Soderberg later went to Washington state for college but dropped out and ended up painting on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., in the late 1960s. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1970 and served three years.
After being discharged, he worked as a machinist during the day and painted and made jewelry at night. He and his wife Clarissa eventually moved their family to Flagstaff, where Soderberg worked in a bronze foundry and learned sculpting. He became an artist in residence at Northern Arizona University and was awarded a Ph.D. in humane letters.
David Jolkovski/Larson Newspapers
Verde Valley Living
The family later moved to a ranch in the middle of Camp Verde on Salt Mine Road.
“It was very stressful, but there were so many good memories,” Misty Soderberg said. “My mom loved animals and I grew up on a nine-acre ranch, a horse property with horse stables. The stable was turned into my dad’s studio and then the rest of the property was pretty much turned into a petting zoo. We had horses, we had all kinds of animals, monkeys, exotics, rescues … hundreds of peacocks.”
Small faceless human figures are employed to symbolize the opposite universal forces which have had an impact on his journey.
“He was always in the studio,” Misty remembered of her father. She was in second grade when they moved to the Verde Valley. “He would usually spend mornings at his favorite restaurant — The Branding Iron — writing letters. This is back when email wasn’t a thing.
“He would wake up, he’d spend hours there and talk to people over coffee all morning long, and he’d write his letters to clients and businesses. Then he’d be in the studio though the rest of the time, and so the that’s kind of what I grew up with.
“We had a lot of unveilings on the property where the studio was, all kinds of events and unveilings, but it was very stressful, because … he had to put money on the table and so I got to see him when I went into the studio and hung out because that’s where he was.”
The Daughters of Soderberg
Soderberg was immensely proud of his daughters, touting their youthful and adult artistic accomplishments on his website and updating other artists in the Verde Valley on their projects. Heather Soderberg now lives in Oregon and Misty Soderberg lives in Scottsdale.
“My sister and I, we could do whatever it was we wanted,” Misty said. “So we painted in our bedroom; I painted swans and fairies on the walls and we both did some painting. We weren’t instructed or anything like that.”
“As a sculptor I kind of was always in my dad and my sister’s shadows, because she is the oldest and she really got more of the exposure,” Misty recalled. “She was really the one in the magazines, but my dad always wanted things to be fair. It was always ‘Heather and Misty,’ it was always ‘the girls,’ even though it was more my sister. I always thought my sister and my dad were the more creative. They can write stories; they can come up with these great ideas. I have to force it a little more. I would help my sister with her math homework, and she would write my creative essays.
“But it was good. We always had a movie on and I would watch him sculpt,” Misty said. “My sister and I spent a lot of time in the studio watching him. So that’s how we how we learned.
“I’ve worked with kids teaching kids to sculpt,” she said. “They’re just as good as I was. But when you take a parent who will nurture a child’s creativity, then that child, if they continue to practice, if anybody puts in a practice, they’re going to become good at what they do.”
“He wasn’t always good, in the beginning,” Misty said. “He had some pieces that he likes to say were used as boat anchors and doorstops, but he’s a really determined person, and he’s driven and he persevered and he learned a skill and he became who is a very well-known artist and has an amazing body of work, very eclectic.”
“A lot of artists don’t get that opportunity to do a very diverse body of work. I know a lot of artists who [all they] are really able to do is cowboy and Western, Indian and Southwestern. It’s like they’re really stuck in this one subject matter.
“My dad got away with — just kind of did whatever he wanted. So he did the mythology, fantasy, but he also did some Southwestern. ‘Merlin’ is that.”
The larger-than-life statue of the wizard Merlin was installed more than 35 years ago and is currently displayed in the Old Marketplace plaza in West Sedona.
Professional Legacy
John and his wife Clarissa separated in the late 1990s and divorced in 1999. Clarissa moved to Sedona and then Hawaii, where she was later joined by Misty.
After a few years in Hawaii, Misty got a job Oregon and along with her sister at a bronze foundry. Clarissa joined them there.
Misty then went to work for a Prescott foundry while Heather stayed in Oregon.
“He was very generous of his time with me,” Misty remembered about her father. “When we moved to Oregon, I flew back here because I had a lot of stuff. He added a trailer and a truck and so we loaded up the trailer and truck and he moved us, drove us to Oregon. When I wanted to move back to Arizona, he came back to Oregon and picked up our stuff and moved us over.”
Clarissa Soderberg also returned to Sedona in the 2000s.
“As a dad, he was kind of always there,” Misty said. “If I had a big molding job, I needed help cutting up the clay so that I could mold it. He’d come over and help me. It usually just cost me a meal, had to buy a meal and that was about it.”
While working at the foundry in Prescott, she would spend weekends going back to her dad’s studio in Camp Verde.
“On and off, I’d always end up working for him sculpting for him,” she said. “I was going through photos and I started making molds with him when I was a young girl, getting my hands dirty mixing plaster. I’m still a mold-maker.”
“I learned how to sculpt because it’s a skill,” Misty said. “So if you’re given the right environment and somebody nurtures your creativity, you can gain the skill, so I learned how to sculpt.”
Misty attended Verde Valley School and experimented with other art mediums. Professionally, she creates molds for sculptors, but her passion is painting.
“If you care enough — and I liked I everything I try — want to try to be good but you need to learn color theory and how to mix clean colors versus dirty colors,” she said. “So there’s a lot of things to learn with bronze. The artists create something, but then it’s turned over to somebody else to finish it, which I hate. I like to [be] hands-on and control the start-to-finish process.”
“‘Merlin’ is what people kind of know him by,” Misty said. “I actually preferred some of his earlier works — a piece called ‘Deep Water Blow.’ You can see the brushstrokes or you can see him pushing the clay — he leaves a mark. His work tended to get a little tighter.”
Most sculptors create the figures but hand off the finished clay to be molded, cast in wax, then bronze and finished with a patina, with other artists using fine tools at each step to match the piece to the original clay.
“I would give him a hard time because in a lot of his pieces, you’ll see his face,” Misty said. “When you’re a sculptor, and you’re doing faces, you don’t mean to do it, but the face you see every day, sometimes you just end up proportionally creating a face you’re familiar [with]. So I would give him a hard time because he’s Poseidon, he’s Merlin, he’s a little bit of Christ. It’s not like he meant to sculpt himself, but yeah, he’s Zeus, he’s all these people.”
In the early 2010s, John Soderberg married author Cynthia Richmond and later moved to Sedona, where Misty said he got more into the community, networking and using Facebook.
“I would say he kind of became an influencer,” Misty said. “My husband would be scrolling through and he’d be like, ‘Oh, your dad’s posting again.’ So ‘Alright, dad’s still going, he’s he’s another day.’”
Richmond and Soderberg divorced in 2013 and she died suddenly in 2019.
Later Years
John’s parents died in their 50s, so he never thought he would live to old age.
“In a lot of ways, he kind of lived for the day, because he didn’t think he’d make it to 72,” Misty said. Soderberg had a health scare around 2010 and said at that time he had no regrets.
Photo courtesy of Peter Gassner and the Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley
In January 2021, he got sick again, related to COVID. Misty Soderberg thanked Jill Trenholm and her partner Frank Ferrante for working as her father’s caregivers over the last few years as his health declined.
Discussing Trenholm’s care of Soderberg, Ferrante said Soderberg “brought out the best, brought out the extraordinary in some very ordinary people.”
Tributes
Steve Soderberg told stories at the celebration of life of his brother’s “impish” sense of humor, talking about a childhood water fight they had with strangers during the festival of Songkran in Thaliand.
Sheila Jackman, who commissioned “Merlin,” also talked about Soderberg’s sense of humor.
While sculpting “Merlin,” Soderberg had dinner with Jackman and their families. He produced an envelope marked “family jewels” and spun it around a lazy susan.
When Jackman opened the envelope, there were about a dozen photos of male body parts inside, and Soderberg asked her to “pick one” so that he could make the statue anatomically correct with the part of her choice.
Photographer Alex Stricker, who photographed not only Soderberg’s artistic works commercially for decades, told stories about travelling around the world with him, taking photos of Soderberg’s adventures. Among them, Stricker and Soderberg hiked the 19,341-foot high Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
“John was a heavy smoker. He didn’t hide that fact,” Stricker said at the celebration of life. “I thought to myself, ‘how on Earth you’re going to make it up there?’ But I’ll tell you, we hiked that mountain with marathon runners who at 13,000 feet dropped out and couldn’t go any further, and John he was like a locomotive,” then made the motion of Soderberg chain-smoking cigarettes, eliciting big laughs from the crowd.
Several students, including Bronwyn Bosman and Nate Hansen, spoke about his impact on their artistic career.
“He really taught me at a very young age that what I do, it will impact the future forever,” Bosman said.
“‘Talent is an invented phenomenon; it does not exist.’ John said this often,” Hansen said. “He did not believe in talent, which was a hard thing to wrap your head around, coming from this man who sculpted gods.”
Several speakers suggested that the city of Sedona formally honor Soderberg and the influence he had in the city, the Verde Valley and art community.
Informality
Soderberg also wasn’t one for formality, often attending events in sleeveless vests and cargo shorts. Misty said her wedding was one of the few events for which he dressed up.
“There was a lot of things he went to that he didn’t really dress up for,” Misty said. “He was authentically who he was and he kind of was like, ‘Take it or leave it, I don’t care.’”
“My dad’s not a fancy guy, right?” Misty remembered. “So he went to some event, I don’t know which one it was, but he was a guest there. He had the bronze, but they wouldn’t let him in because they just thought he was some random. Actually, they thought it was like a Unabomber — like they were actually concerned about him. But it turned out he was actually like the main person that was supposed to be there.”
Photo courtesy of Karen Aileen Williams.
“There’s many a time my dad was judged and he would have to be explain who he was, because it didn’t just happen once. It was more than once.”
“I’m known as his irreverent daughter. I was going through photos [and] my sister and I were always making faces,” Misty said. “We didn’t have him on a pedestal. He was just my dad.”
