NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

A U.S. military bomber plane is living in a West Philadelphia warehouse awaiting the artist who will turn it into a public sculpture for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

With its 73-foot wingspan, the Grumman SE-2 Tracker was designed to drop bombs onto submarines during the Cold War. After years spent on aircraft carriers, it had a second life fighting forest fires in California, using its capacity to dump water on flames. Then it was stripped of its engines and put out to pasture in Alabama.

"I found it on eBay," said sculptor Jordan Griska. "I was the only bidder, so I won the plane."

Griska employs origami, paper-folding techniques onto large industrial objects. Once a finalist for the West Prize, he has installed work into the Eastern State Penitentiary. He will fold the 45-foot-long Grumman to resemble what it would look like if it hit the ground nose-first. The history of the plane and its theatrical scale hold the artist's interest.

"If I'm manipulating something like a passenger plane that was flown by a hobbyist for friends there's not much exciting about it," said Griska. "This saw some serious action—it was on an aircraft carrier, it flew into fires."

The plane will be displayed in Lenfest Plaza, the new public space now under construction on Cherry Street near the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The crumpled fuselage will be turned into a greenhouse for growing edible plants.

The sculpture will echo the biblical passage of beating swords into plowshares, says PAFA president David Brigham. "It's that idea of transformation of a plane that was formerly a military airplane that now has become a carcass, a wreck, and going back to nature."

The sculpture is expected to be completed by August and formally unveiled Oct. 1.