Colbar Art

Ovidiu Colea did not begin with a factory. He began with an idea of freedom powerful enough to survive a dictatorship, imprisonment, poverty, and twenty years of waiting.

Born in Bucharest in 1939, Colea grew up under communist rule. He later told the United States Senate that he and his father listened in darkness to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe—their brief nightly connection to a freer world.

At eighteen, in the summer of 1958, he tried to escape Romania by crossing the Danube. A guard caught him before he reached the river. Colea spent the next five years in a prison labor camp, enduring hunger, punishment, forced labor, and sleeping on the floor. The experience did not change his determination to reach America.

He arrived legally in the United States in 1978 with almost nothing. On his first airplane journey, he pressed to the window and saw the Statue of Liberty from the sky—the figure he had dreamed about since hearing Voice of America with his father as a boy. His first job paid three dollars an hour in a casting factory. At night he drove a New York City taxi, and on weekends he worked a third job. Nine months after the factory laid him off, he helped form Barrett-Colea. The immigrant who had once been imprisoned for seeking freedom would eventually become one of America’s leading makers of the Statue of Liberty.