Artwork

At 110% the size of their likeness, the Legends Row sculpture is truly larger than life. The sculpture depicts 14 of Toronto’s greatest hockey legends outside the current home of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Scotiabank Centre (formerly the Air Canada Centre). Commissioned by the Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Club. Forteen figures in total including: Wendel Clark, Turk Broda, Charlie Conacher, Syl Apps, Darryl Sittler, Johnny Bower, Mats Sundin, Borje Salming, Teeder Kennedy, Dave Keon, Tim Horton, Frank Mahovlich, Red Kelly, and George Armstrong built from 2013 to 2017. With the addition of these final four in 2017, Legends Row was declared full for the foreseeable future. 

Erik Blome is an accomplished sculptor with works across the nation. Blome attended the University of Michigan where he earned a B.F.A. in Fine Art. He received his M.F.A. in sculpture from Boston University. Subsequently, he received a Rotary Scholarship and did postgraduate work at the Royal College of Art in London, England, where he received a postgraduate diploma in sculpture and drawing.  

Blome has taught sculpture, bronze casting, public art and drawing at several colleges and art schools, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Academy of Art in San Francisco, and the Royal College of Art in London. He was a visiting artist at the American University in Cairo in 2009, and an artist-in-residence at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia in January 2011 where he built a fine art bronze foundry. 

In the summer of 2011, he was an artist-in-residence at the City of Oak Lawn, Illinois where he had a temporary studio set-up to create a 9/11 first responders monument using large steel beams from the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York City.  Blome was a U.S. Fulbright Teaching Award Recipient for 2011-12 with affiliation at the sculpture department of Helwan University in Cairo, Egypt.  He was most recently a Fulbright Specialist teaching bronze casting at NIAAD in Entebbe Uganda. He completed a life-size bronze sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. for the island of Bimini in the Bahamas unveiled by Prime Minister Christie in 2013. 

Currently, he is working on a 130% life-size bronze statue of hat-manufacturer John Stetson, the namesake for Stetson University’s campus in DeLand, Florida.