Richmond’s biggest art mystery has been solved. Believed lost, sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen’s epic art deco statue, known as “Wings II,” has been located in Chesterfield County.

In last year’s Best of Richmond issue, Style Weekly reported that the piece was being sought by the artist’s biographer, Aaron Street, having disappeared from public view in the 1980s following its local prominence. But the stunning, silver-toned winged angel was never really missing. Depicted wearing an old-school aviator’s cap with swooping, pointed wings gracefully outstretched, “Wings II” was just in loving private hands.

“At one point, we had the statue on the landing of our stairway in our former home on Monument Avenue, and you could actually see it in the window,” says Todd Jenkins, who inherited the majestic, 7-foot piece from his father, Alfred P. Jenkins, an aviation and automobile enthusiast and the former owner of the family business, the L.H. Jenkins Book Binding Company. “We weren’t hiding it, by any means.”

From 1977 to 1984, “Wings II” was a striking centerpiece in the large bay windows at Richmond’s Byrd Airport. It’s the silver duplicate of a famous statue cast in bronze, “Wings,” that has been a prominent fixture in the Rand Tower in Minneapolis since 1929, a piece commissioned by famed aviator and businessman Rufus Rand.

Todd and his wife Holly-Faye now live near Pocahontas State Park, where “Wings II” stands as an opulent centerpiece in their front room, fittingly overseen by a large painting of father Alfred in his youth. “The Shah of Iran, back in the mid-’70s, supposedly made an offer on it,” says Jenkins, who has amassed a lot of research material on the piece. “He was deposed before that could happen.”

The original “Wings” is one of Hansen’s most famous works. Others include his 1957 recasting of the Liberty statue in Yorktown, busts of Orville and Wilbur Wright found at the Kitty Hawk National Monument in North Carolina, and numerous large-scale Art Deco pieces surrounding the Hoover Dam on the Nevada/Arizona border, including the epic angel sculpture, “Wings of the Republic,” which shares similarities with the two “Wings” sculptures.

It is still not known if the second Wings was created for a failed commission, or just because the  Norwegian expatriate artist wanted another one for himself. He was certainly proud of it. From the early ’40s to 1970, when it was used as part of a display in the U.S. Navy Museum, “Wings” II sat on top of his studio outside of Charlottesville and was used as a weather vane. “Given that, it’s amazing that it stayed in the shape it’s in,” says Jenkins, adding that “Wings II” has had only light restoration work. “It’s in excellent condition.”

Aaron Street came to Richmond on Wednesday to see the statue in person. “It’s amazing, like many of Hansen’s works I’ve been able to track down” says the Minnesota-based author, and history researcher who started the search for “Wings II” with a Jan. 2024 blog post seeking help in tracking the piece down after it disappeared from public view in the 1980s. Street is the curator of the Oskar J.W. Hansen Archives at www.oskarjwhansen.org, and is working on a biography of the artist, who died in 1971. “Hansen is one of the most interesting, important, and as-yet uncelebrated artists of the 20th century,” Street has written.

How the Jenkins family ended up with “Wings II” is a complicated tale. It started after Hansen’s death, when his money-challenged widow Hope loaned the sculpture to the airport, thinking that it would rejuvenate interest in Oskar’s work and perhaps sell for a healthy sum. But she had to take out a small loan to transport the piece to Richmond from the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington D.C. When she passed away in 1983, still owing money on that loan, “Wings II” became the property of Sovran Bank, today’s Bank of America, and nearly repossessed until father Alfred, anonymously, paid off the note and allowed it to remain at the terminal.

All was well until the airport was renovated in 1984, and renamed Richmond International. It was proposed that the sculpture be moved to an out-of-the-way location affixed onto a six inch pedestal, cordoned off only by ropes. “My father was, like, absolutely not,” Jenkins says. “This is not protected. And the airport wouldn’t budge on finding a better location. My dad was at that point in his late ’80s and very determined in the way he saw things. So he said, no, I’m just gonna keep it.”

The goal at that point was to find the winged angel an appropriate home, such as The Valentine or the Science Museum. Instead, the statue was left in a crate, where it remained until after Alfred’s passing in 1995.

At first, Todd left “Wings II” boxed up at a local shipping company, Riggers, until his wife Holly-Faye discovered it. “I saw this billing and was, like, what is this?” she recalls. “And then he told me the story about his father and the statue, and I had remembered seeing the statue as a child because my daddy used to fly out of Byrd Airport all the time. I said, ‘Oh my, we have to get that.'”

When “Wings II” was taken out of the crate, the couple couldn’t believe how dynamic and beautiful it was.

Holly-Faye smiles. “I said, ‘Honey, you’re home.'”

Style Weekly would like to thank Pamela Kiecker Royall and Tracy Bernabo for their help in tracking down “Wings II.” 

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the location of the Hoover Dam.