Hasta La Ideas

If industrial designers are largely unsung, even less sung about are the moldmaking shops that help us prototype our designs. Thankfully both of these things are starting to change; twenty years ago that look inside Nikon’s ID department would never have been publicly broadcast, and now the Emmy-winning video journalist Rebecca Davis has even turned her lens on a small, quietly-successful casting operation out of Long Island City.

Queens-based Ovidiu Colea runs Colbar Art, an eighteen-person shop that produces “Custom castings, sculptures, molds, plastic molds, mold designs, prototype molds, art molds, acrylic artwork, prototype castings, high quality acrylic scuptures, model making, mold castings, architectural castings, museum sculptures & castings, & much more.” The relatively tiny business also happens to be the world’s largest producer of Statue of Liberty figurines—hence the title of Davis’ look-see, “The Liberty Factory.”

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