Please check back soon for suggested itineraries for visiting Philip Sciortino’s public art.
Philip G. Sciortino’s public art constitutes a major part of his artistic legacy in Northern California, particularly in the Yuba–Sutter region, Folsom and Sacramento County, Citrus Heights, and Oroville. His civic commissions characteristically bring traditional figurative sculpture into dialogue with local history, public memory, and the particular communities for which they were made.
In the Yuba–Sutter region, Sciortino’s public sculpture became closely bound to the civic work of remembrance. He created veterans memorials in both Marysville and Yuba City in 2000, giving permanent form to the region’s history of military service and sacrifice. The Yuba County Veterans Memorial in Marysville was dedicated on September 23, 2000, while the Sutter County Veterans Memorial in Yuba City was dedicated on November 4, 2000. Conceived as public places of gathering as well as commemoration, the two memorials bring a strongly figurative and human dimension to civic memory, addressing veterans, families, and the broader community through themes of duty, loss, honor, and remembrance. Together, they form an important paired chapter in Sciortino’s public work in Northern California.
Sciortino’s civic work extended into Folsom, Sacramento County, Citrus, Sparks, Nevada and Lakeport (for the Pomo Tribal Health Consortium). Heights. Folsom Bound (2005), installed at the Historic Folsom light-rail station and executed in granite, brass, bronze, and copper, evokes the city’s railroad history through a densely populated historical composition associated with Theodore and Anna Judah and the diverse peoples who shaped the region; Sciortino himself emphasized the importance of inclusion and community participation in conceiving the work. The City of Folsom’s public-art inventory also records his Marshall Farley and Veterans Memorial, the latter dedicated in 2007 and incorporating a grieving female figure, an eagle, granite, and memorial inscriptions honoring the fallen.
In Citrus Heights, Celebrate Citrus Heights, a public monument in bronze and granite, turns the city’s history into a visual narrative extending from nineteenth-century settlement and the railroad through Sylvan School, women firefighters during the Second World War, and the campaign for city incorporation. Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission records further document Sciortino’s selection through a competitive public-art process for the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center, indicating the broader reach of his civic practice beyond these best-known monuments.
More than twenty-five years after his first memorial work in Marysville and Yuba City memorials, Sciortino returned to the theme of veterans and civic remembrance in Oroville, where his final major public monument, Bugler and Eagle, was installed at the Oroville Veterans Memorial Park in April 2026. Situated beside the Veterans Memorial Hall, the work brings his long engagement with veterans, civic memory, and public commemoration to a fitting culmination in the community where he spent his later years. Taken together, the Marysville, Yuba City, and Oroville works form an important arc within Sciortino’s public career, spanning more than a quarter century of sculpture devoted to remembrance and the enduring place of veterans within communal life.
Together, these works reveal a sustained conception of public sculpture not simply as decoration, but as a means of giving durable form to communal history, remembrance, and civic identity—an aspect of Sciortino’s life and legacy that this website is now beginning to document and that will soon be developed into a suggested self-guided tour of works that can still be visited in their public settings.
Philip Sciortino · Sculptor
To learn more about Philip’s life as an artist and to explore his sculpture, public monuments, commissions, and other work, please visit the website he created during his lifetime.
philipsciortino.net
