Stephen de Staebler (courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery) was committed to work with clay throughout his career.  His figures share with Oliveira a sense of existential vulnerability. De Staebler, in 1968, only 35 years old at the time, created one of the few successful modernist ecclesiastical artworks, when he built the sanctuary at Newman Center in Berkeley. Since then he has been occupied with building fractured human figures, made of clay, which, he points out, is the crust of the earth, the terra-cotta---(Latin for "cooked earth"). For great stability and, even monumentality, he has cast many of them in bronze.  His figures are partial, fragmentary, incomplete and all the more human for being imperfect. And, Like Oliveira, his work relates to artistic tradition. De Staebler has absorbed the art of previous sculptors, like the creators of Egyptian effigies and moderns such as Lehmbruck and Giacometti, enhancing the history of sculpture by relating it to an evolving tradition.