Hey, Curious305: Why is there a man sitting in a box at the Fort Lauderdale airport?

Editor’s Note: This article was inspired by a question submitted from a Miami Herald reader on Instagram through Curious305, our community-powered reporting series that solicits questions from readers about Miami-Dade, Broward, the Florida Keys and the rest of the Sunshine State. Submit your question here or scroll down to fill out our form.

Hey Curious 305: Why is there a man sitting inside a box in Fort Lauderdale’s airport?

Have you met the airport’s most popular vendor?

He likes to dress casual, in faded jeans and a redish-pink shirt, and is always listening to a Walkman, a portable cassette player.

No one really knows his name but you’ve probably seen him around Terminal 1 at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, waiting to open his toy shop.

Oh, and he’s not even human — although he is a copy of one.

The airport vendor is actually a hyper-realistic painted bronze sculpture by artist Duane Hanson, who died 25 years ago. Called “Vendor with Walkman,” the installation features a man, believed to be older than 30, sitting in a folding chair, listening to a Walkman, while waiting to open his toy shop at the airport. There’s a toy airplane, janitorial supplies and various signs and announcements about the shop inside the glass box with him.

Hanson was paid $170,000 in 1990 for the commission, according to the Broward Cultural Division. It used to be located in Terminal 3, but was moved in 2014 to the baggage claim area of Terminal 1, where it remains today and continues to be one of the airport’s most talked about and photographed artworks.

Hanson was well known for using his art to show reality — regular people in common poses doing mundane things. His pieces were so “realistic that those who saw them could not believe they weren’t real,” according to an obituary published in the Miami Herald on Jan. 9, 1996.

“Using polyester resin, Bondo, bronze, or fiberglass, Hanson’s technique involved casting living people and then painstakingly painting the fiberglass figure with all the imperfections and veins of actual skin,” according to ArtNet.

His sculptures were so eerily lifelike that in January 1991, a security guard at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale called 911 when they couldn’t get a woman sitting in the lobby to move, according to Herald records. When paramedics arrived to revive her, they determined that the gray-haired woman was actually a Hanson sculpture.

Hanson, who was born to Swedish farmers in Minnesota in 1925, studied art at the University of Washington, Macalester College in St. Paul and Cranbrook Academy in Detroit, according to the the archive.

He eventually moved his family to Miami in 1965 and got a job teaching at Miami Dade College’s north campus. His career took him to Manhattan for a few years before he moved to Davie with his second wife in 1973 to escape “the pressures of the New York art scene” and handle his first case of lymphatic cancer, according to the Herald archive. He soon became an important part of South Florida’s art scene.

He left behind more than 100 sculptures after his death in January 1996, many worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, in galleries and private art collections around the world, according to the Herald archive.

Another one of Hanson’s sculptures, “The Traveler,” can still be found at Orlando International Airport. And from October 2019 through February 2020, Hanson’s “Football Player” was showcased at Miami International Airport as part of the Super Bowl 54 festivities.

The 1981 sculpture’s model was sculptor and former professional athlete Robert Thiele. It was on loan from the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum.

So, how do you know if you’re looking at a Hanson sculpture?

Just look for a glazed, far away look in its eyes.

“It’s the look of a soldier who’s been in combat too long, the look of a steer just before the hammer comes down — the glazed expression that says, “No hope,” reads a 2009 Palm Beach Post article that was printed in the Miami Herald, discussing the “Duane Hanson: Photographs and Sculptures” exhibit that was opening at the Boca Raton Museum of Art at the time.

This story was originally published June 8, 2021 at 11:13 AM with the headline "Hey, Curious305: Why is there a man sitting in a box at the Fort Lauderdale airport?."