English ivy frames the bay doors of Cherrylion Studios, an offbeat industrial warehouse tucked away on a narrow one-block street in Atlanta’s Berkeley Park neighborhood. Here, over the first five months of 2017, owner and sculptor Martin Dawe (B.V.A. ’80) shaped more than 800 pounds of clay into a striking figure of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Shepherded through an ancient, painstaking process called “lost-wax casting,” that eight-foot portrait of the greatest American civil rights hero now rises in bronze outside the Georgia State Capitol at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal revealed Dawe’s statue Aug. 28, more than three years after he signed a bill authorizing its construction and installation on the Capitol grounds. The first sculptor appointed to the task, Andy Davis, died in a motorcycle accident less than two weeks after accepting the commission in 2015. Following extensive research and review, the Capitol Arts Standards Commission appointed Dawe, one of four final candidates, to assume the project a year later.

To honor the memory of the late sculptor, Dawe modeled King in a pose inspired by the 1956 photograph Davis had selected. However, his sculpture reveals the civil rights leader as he was in 1963, moments after recasting American history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with his “I Have a Dream” speech — his face teeming with confidence, shoulders relaxed, a palpable peace suffusing throughout his body.

With almost four decades of professional sculpture experience, Dawe says King’s statue, funded entirely by private donations, was the most daunting portrait of his career.

“He had the most elusive features — extremely hard to capture,” he said. “You can look at 20 photographs of Martin Luther King and not recognize half of them. There are statues of him all over the country, and hardly any of them look like the same man. The whole thing was just a little bit scary.”