Some of Peter Calaboyias' artwork has gone astray over the years.

Not unusual if Calaboyias was a miniaturist painter or cameo engraver, but much of his work involves massive pieces, metal objects such as the five bronze vases he is creating now at Woodward Inc., 128 Myoma Road, Mars.

But that hasn't prevented the sculptures of the Grove City College artist in residence from going missing or being moved.

Calaboyias said his 1971 work “Five Factors” disappeared for 20 years after it was removed from the Carnegie Library branch in Squirrel Hill.

“It was five stainless steel columns, each 10 feet high. The sculpture had a spatial relationship. You could walk through it,” said Calaboyias. 'When they expanded the library, they removed the work, and there was no record of where it went.”

Calaboyias said the disassembled sculpture was eventually found in a Pittsburgh city storage facility under the 62nd Street Bridge in 2006.

“It's where they stored old fences and lampposts,” he said. He added “Five Factors” was reassembled in Mellon Park.

More recently, in 2011, Calaboyias' work, “Silver Grid Wall,” was removed from its spot above the escalators in the Pittsburgh International Airport terminal to free up the space for advertising, he said.

The Allegheny County Airport Authority gave the 78-foot-long work back to him.

“That was the biggest disappointment,” he said. “It doesn't give a good impression of our county administrators.”

But the worst was the fate of his “Butler Arch” which debuted in 1982 in the center court of Clearview Mall.

“Later, the mall donated it to the city and I think they put it in one of their parks,” said Calaboyias.

Not anymore.

“It was down here in Butler Memorial Park for six or seven years until we were made to remove it,” said Bob McAnallen, working foreman for the Butler Parks Department.

“Our insurance said it was a liability. Kids were climbing clear to the top of it; they would have needed suction cups,” McAnallen said.

After two years of fruitlessly offering the two 8- and-a-half-feet tall stainless steel pieces to other municipalities, the “Butler Arch” was taken to a scrapyard, he said.

Still, in the more than four decades he's been working in bronze and metals, Calaboyias has created works of art that can be viewed all over the world, including in Pennsylvania, Greece, Germany, and Atlanta.

For example, he said, “Tribute,” was created in 1996 for the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

Calaboyias said his winning submission was for “a representation of 100 years of the modern Games.”

“Its fan shape is the curve of a Greek vase,” he said, “and it's straddled with three runners in profile.”

Installed in Centennial Park, Calaboyias said the sculpture was damaged when a bomb exploded on July 27, 1996, killing two people and injuring more than 100.

Calaboyias said he chose not to repair the damage because the sculpture had protected visitors from the explosion.

“Now, people put their fingers in the imprints and holes left by the shrapnel,” he said. “They wore the patina off the sculpture.”

At Grove City College, where he has served as artist in residence developing new courses for the art curriculum, assisting other professors and teaching sculpture and other courses since 1995, Calaboyias created “Pythagorean Pi,” a 14-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture that stands outside STEM Hall, in 2013.

“I proposed a sculpture to represent the new growth of the engineering disciplines on campus,” he said.

The artwork incorporates a circle, a triangle and an arc into which scientific symbols and images are etched.

Calaboyias said, “Pythagoras, he measured the triangle, and Archimedes squared the circle. I put them both together.”

According to Grove City College, “Pythagorean Pi” is only the second public art work created specifically for the college campus. Calaboyias' sculpture joins a life-size statue of J. Howard Pew, a member of the class of 1900 and major benefactor who served 40 years as president of the college board of trustees.

Calaboyias said, “I have a small foundry for my smaller pieces. I make the molds and pour the metal.”

“For more larger work, when I'm pouring three, four hundred pounds of metal, I go to Matthews International (in Pittsburgh) where I have a crew of four or five,” he said.

“I do the design, the math, the layout and am in charge of the project,” he said.

Matthews was involved with Calabyoyias latest project, a private commission, which is why he was on the shop floor at Woodward last week, reviewing the welding on five bronze vases. Four of the vases are 32 inches in diameter and 20 inches high, while the fourth is 42 inches in diameter and 30 inches high. Each weighs about 350 pounds.

Brink Woodward, the owner of the metal fabricator, said the bronze couldn't be rolled into a cone shape.

“We looked at the problem,” said Woodward. “It had to be welding. With big heavy bronze plates, there's no forming or rolling that.”

Calaboyias said he designed the vases to be cast as flat pieces and then brought the sections to Woodward to be shaped and welded.

“There were two flat patterns. I designed and cast them. They were designed to be formed into a cone,” he said. “Welding was a challenge.”

Now, the challenge was to sand down the welding lines on each vase.

John Pitzer, the general manager at Woodward, said, “Depending on who's working on the floor, I've had three men working on this.”

“This is a very good contemporary design. It is a practical, functional design for aesthetics,” Calaboyias said. “It's engineering and art and technique coming together.”

Once done, Calaboyias will take the vases to a private mansion in Port Royal, Fla., where plumbers will punch holes in the bottoms for the insertion of water and gas lines. The artist said the vases will be mounted on columns around a pool and into fountains that will mix cascading water with jets of fire.

Calaboyias attributed his interest in art and sculpture to his memories of growing up in Europe and Africa during World War II and seeing images of the broken and twisted metal of machines, broken marble Greek sculptures and objects carved in ivory and ebony from Africa.

In 1939, Calaboyias' mother, who was pregnant with him, was visiting her father when she was stranded on the Greek island of Ikaria by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Calaboyias was born in the village of Karavostamo in 1940. The family escaped from the fascists and Nazis in Greece before ending up in a refugee camp in the Belgian Congo.

After the war ended, the family returned to the United States and settled in Johnstown.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in art education from Penn State University and his master's from Indiana (Pa.) University, Calaboyias began a career as an art teacher in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Carnegie Mellon University, the Community College of Allegheny County, and Grove City College while developing his reputation as an innovative sculptor.

Calaboyias has continued his association with IUP. One of his sculptures, “Atticascape,” was installed there in 1985 after a competition for a work to be placed in front of Sally B. Johnson Hall, along Oakland Avenue.

He was recently honored with the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award.

The award — the highest given by the Alumni Association to its alumni — is offered to those who have achieved distinction in their chosen fields or who have demonstrated loyal and active service to their alma mater. Fewer than 300 of IUP's 110,000 alumni have received this award.

“I travel a lot, and I still live on the island of Ikaria at least three months of the year. I have a studio there,” said Calaboyias, who lives in Shadyside and commutes to Grove City.