For Professor Littleton Alston, MFA, art is deeply tied to the stories it tells. 

His story began after middle school, when he volunteered as a safety patrol guard. One snowy winter day, he rescued black-and-white copies of National Geographic from being discarded by the librarian. He dragged the magazines 10 blocks home, stuffing them inside his coat. 

Using pencils and paper from his absent father, Alston spent hours in the basement sketching scenes from the magazines. 

“I wanted to draw so much,” Alston recalls. “So, I started really loving it.” 

Recognizing her son’s self-taught talent, Alston’s mother created a makeshift cardboard portfolio and worked with the middle school principal to arrange his transfer to Duke Ellington School of the Arts. He easily passed the admissions exam by drawing a still life using his familiar method of pencil and paper. 

Graduating at the top of his class earned Alston a scholarship to study sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, a rare achievement given his circumstances. 

“It was all new territory,” Alston remembers. “We were coming from another planet.” 

Between work-study, a late-night job at a grocery store, classes and finding time to sleep, Alston’s life was hectic. 

“I learned how to try and balance doing as much as I could,” Alston said. 

After college, Alston attended a graduate program at the Maryland Institute College of Art before moving his story to Creighton, where he has served as a sculpture professor in the Fine and Performing Arts program since 1990. 

Anika Roddy, a studio art and art history major, is taking Sculpture I with Alston this semester. She said his positive energy in the classroom contributes to his message that art is a form of storytelling. 

“He’s this amazing storyteller,” she said. “It is such a cool quality of this very wise professor, because you feel like he’s a mentor in a lot of ways and really sees you.” 

Alston’s storytelling is on display at Creighton in sculptures such as “The Flame” and “St. Ignatius.” According to his Public Art Omaha profile, his larger-than-life sculptures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Gibson stand across the city. His work also extends to Washington, D.C.’s National Statuary Hall, where Pulitzer Prize-winning Nebraska author Willa Cather proudly represents the state. 

Most recently, Alston created a sculpture for Loyola University Chicago depicting Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, which sits on the Jesuit campus after Alston’s careful production. 

Reimagining someone’s life and legacy through sculpture is an intricate process. It requires researching photographs from different stages of a person’s life, selecting an appropriate age to represent, perfecting the likeness, creating molds, casting and scaling the sculpture and selecting its final patina. 

Alston intentionally weaves the subject’s story into the sculpture’s form. He seated the sculpture of Sister Jean so students can sit beside it and coated it in light gold to give it a vibrant, commanding presence. He also preserved Sister Jean’s calming spirit through the sculpture’s hands, which hold a basketball — a symbol Alston likens to God’s steady hands holding Earth. 

“You also think about how you capture their soul in their eyes, and in their posture. There’s only one person like that that’s ever lived on this Earth,” he said. “As a sculptor, I think my task is really to try and do justice to what God has created.” 

Alston instills this perspective and approach to storytelling in his students through his teaching. 

“Sculpture is something that is a gift that you give,” he said. “I want to appreciate the wonder and beauty of each individual and try to recreate that gift that they’ve been given: life.”