Monumental Achievements

Steven Barber Shares About His Most Recent Projects, Including a Statue of Incoming President Trump

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

Building monuments for figures in American history is Steven Barber’s newfound passion.

He shared some of his recent projects with the Palisadian-Post, including announcing the completion of his latest brainchild, a statue of the 45th and soon to be 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

The Palisadian previously oversaw the building of the Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Sally Ride and Lowe’s Military monuments. Following the November 5 election, Barber brought his next idea to fruition.

“The project started back in July of 2016 when then-President Trump gave a speech about building a statuary park to honor 30 American heroes, and I was moved immediately,” said Barber, a Huntington Palisades resident for 10 years. “I’ve literally been working on this for nine years. I was able to receive $300,000 in funding from an anonymous donor who’s an incredible patriot and believes in America and her freedoms, and I honestly couldn’t be prouder to be working with him.”

The bronze monument was sculpted in Loveland, Colorado, by brothers Mark and George Lundeen and fellow artist Joey Bainer.

“This is my fifth  collaboration with them, and they’re the absolute best at what they do,” Barber said.  “As the project leader and visionary it was my idea to do the Fight! Fight! Fight! as soon as I saw the assassination attempt on July 13 at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.”

According to Barber the monument is seven feet high on a five-foot pedestal standing 12 feet in the air and weighs 885 pounds. It will be unveiled early this year in Florida, and Trump will be present.

In the final months of his first term, Barber explained, Trump proposed through executive orders the construction of a National Garden of American Heroes honoring what he called “great figures of America’s history,” including numerous Founding Fathers, activists, pop culture  icons, political figures and celebrities. Congress did not appropriate funding for such a garden, and President Joe Biden revoked the executive orders relating to the garden in May 2021.

“Should he revisit that, Trump  said he’d like to do Abraham Lincoln, Sally Ride, Neil Armstrong, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, and we’ve already done those,” Barber said. “There were others as well … all of them really well-known Americans.”

An award-winning Los Angeles-based filmmaker, Barber has been working with Kelsey Grammer, Josh Rolling, John Savage, Ed Harris, Dan Aykroyd and many other actors on military documentaries for several years about U.S. Marines who were lost in the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. His Vanilla Fire Productions has hit the Oscar shortlist on three separate occasions and will be debuting the Nadine Ramsey story in May at the Holocaust museum.

Barber also just unveiled the first military monument in the history of any Fortune 500 company for Lowe’s Home Improvement, and he has several monuments online for 2025 and 2026.

“The most exciting part of this whole thing is the chance to build monuments for the Trump Administration’s Heroes Park, and I got an indication they’re going to let me build seven or eight,” Barber added. “My team has already built several of the monuments the president has envisioned. The opportunity to construct the monument to the greatest story in the history of the world—Apollo 11 and Apollo 13—and then the first American woman in space [Sally Ride] and now the President of the United States is beyond anything I ever dreamed of.”

Barber is the ultimate “people person” and travels year round to fundraise by himself. He said he does not let setbacks or negativity deter him from making his dreams reality.

Barber has made it his life’s mission to memorialize the men and women of NASA.

“My longterm goal is to build monuments for all of the Apollo missions,” he explained. “The first one of the Apollo 11 crew we did for the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing in 2019, and after the success of that project, I was able to raise another $750,000 to build Apollo 13.”

Those monuments, housed at Kennedy Space Center and Houston Space Flight Center (of which four million people visit every year) were followed by Sally Ride monument unveilings in Long Island, New York, in June 2022 and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley in July 2023 honoring the first American woman in space.

Ride, who was born in Encino and died of cancer in 2012 at age 61, is buried near 14th and Pico at Woodlawn Cemetery, less than 10 minutes from Barber’s home. Reagan was in office the day Ride took her seat aboard Challenger on June 18, 1983, for the first of her two space shuttle missions.   

Barber has been invited to Trump’s inauguration, which is scheduled to take place January 20 at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. He said the president-elect has not seen the monument, and he looks forward to surprising him.

Among the films Barber has made is “Unbeaten,” a 2009 documentary about the world’s longest wheelchair race from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska, that featured 31 paraplegic athletes.

Two years ago Barber landed “Touchdown”—the first Super Bowl monument in history (also a George Lundeen creation)—in the foyer of The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for two weeks leading up to the game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where the hometown Rams beat Cincinnati 23-20 in Super Bowl LVI.

“I put it on a truck and brought it out here,” said Barber, who used to live in the Highlands before moving a few miles up Sunset to the Huntington. “It was the right monument at the right venue at the right time.”   

Barber met the Lowe’s CEO at the Super Bowl and made a presentation to him, as it is one of the top companies for hiring military veterans, and the monument of an active combat service woman titled “Building Memories” was unveiled on Veterans Day in Fayetteville, North Carolina.          

“What I’ve realized in my journey of 63 years is that anything and everything is possible,” Barber said. “If you never quit and you overcome and you improvise and you adapt and you fight, fight, fight for what you believe in like President Trump, you cannot fail in America. It’s not possible.”