Minneapolis artist Aldo Moroni is dying of pancreatic cancer. He's known for his ceramic architectural sculptures which can range from single buildings just inches tall to entire room-filling civilizations. Moroni is now working on one final epic piece, which he may not finish.

"This will be it," Moroni said, showing off the work in progress at his large, sunlit studio in the California Building in northeast Minneapolis.

It's a huge landscape built of clay, wax and mastic. It represents part of the North American continent all the way down through Central America and deep into South America.

"I am on short time: months, not years. So, I got to work hard and try and get this finished. Then I've got to find a home for it," he said.

Aldo Moroni applies molten wax to "Blind Cortez," the latest phase of his project about the history of Mesoamerica. Moroni says his recent diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer means this will be his last piece. Euan Kerr | MPR News

Like many of Moroni's big projects, this one is being built in phases. It started as “M.EX. — Mesoamerican Experience,” portraying the thriving civilizations spread across the Americas until the European colonists arrived.

He completed that late last year, and then ceremonially destroyed it in front of a studio filled with guests.

He calls this next phase, "Blind Cortez." It's being built on the ruins of “M.EX.,” just as in the early 1500s, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés built on the remnants of the Aztec civilization he destroyed.

"So now, we will start to bring it back to life and we will bring it and run it from that 1519 date [when Cortés arrived to what is now Mexico] until I get too confused to build any more," he said.

Moroni said he feels fortunate to be able to work on the piece, even if he isn’t able to finish it.

“So many beautiful people came and showed support for me and have allowed me to spend these last weeks or months doing this, which is what I love,” he said. “And it’s a beautiful gift and I intend to treat it exactly as it is. Every single minute that I can do that, I will do it.”

Aldo Moroni delights in embedding cultural references in his pieces. In the case of “M.EX: The Mesoamerican Experience,” a huge turtle head at one end of the sculpture reflects the belief in some cultures that the world rests on the back of a turtle. Euan Kerr | MPR News

Moroni came to the Twin Cities from Chicago in the 1970s to go to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He got good grades: straight A’s, he said.

Yet he remembers feeling he wasn't doing what he was meant to do. When his professor Aribert Munzner quizzed him about his malaise, Moroni mentioned how as a 4-year-old he loved making little houses.

So, Munzner told him to go home and make one little house.

"So I did," Moroni said. "And he said, 'That's nice. Now go make 10.' I did. 'Now make 100.' I did. By the time I got done, I have like 30,000 individual buildings on this huge imaginary world, all written with ridiculous histories that I had just made up," he said.

Sculptor Aldo Moroni inside of his Minneapolis studio. Evan Frost | MPR News

And Moroni said suddenly everyone understood what he was doing.

Then, in 1977, Walker Art Center director Martin Friedman commissioned him to do a piece shortly after he graduated.

Moroni said he's basically kept working ever since. He insists, though, that he's not a model builder. He's a storyteller, telling tales about what he knows.

"If you come from a farm, you know about cows," he said. "I come from the city: I know about taxicabs."

And now he knows a lot about history. Many of his commissions have been about places, which he researches and then sculpts in clay or bronze. In 1996, he created a huge ceramic map of the Ninth Federal Reserve District. It still hangs in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

In 2004, he made bronze representations of historic houses in the Marcy Holmes neighborhood of Minneapolis. He mounted them on brick pedestals on what's now known as the Sixth Avenue Stroll. And all through his career he's made political pieces like “M.EX.” and “Blind Cortez.”

Aldo Moroni works on the landscape which is the basis for “Blind Cortez.” As with previous long-term projects, he is building on the remnants of a previous phase of the project which he destroyed during a ceremony in November 2019. Euan Kerr | MPR News

Now, Moroni is focused on his own legacy. He wants his newly refurbished studio to be open for public use after he's gone. As he works on his final piece, he says he feels upbeat.

"I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of pain. Let's get that straight," he said. "So, they are giving me a lot of good drugs to keep the pain off my back" — because Moroni has work to do.

He grabs a pot of molten wax and gets back building “Blind Cortez's” world.