Thoughts about art and community.
In 2019, I spent a day with Yolande Van Herdeen, an expat South African whose path serendipitously led her to Greenwood, Mississippi. When I met her, Yolande was serving as the artist-in-residence at ArtPlace Mississippi, a community art center in downtown Greenwood offering classes and programs for all ages. What stayed with me from that visit wasn’t just the art itself, but the way Yolande explained the unique role ArtPlace plays in Greenwood.
Read MoreMy awesome former intern Paige created this short video about the evolution of Deep Roots, the final painting inspired a conversation I had in 2019 with Drick Rodgers and Julia Rodgers in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
Read MorePainting is hard - particularly at the end of the process. Two steps forward, nine steps back. A great deal more time staring at the easel than actively painting.
Read MoreCreatively, I've been mulling over patterns. Literal and physical patterns in our environment. How single motifs or behaviors add up in meaningful ways over the course of a lifetime of a person or a landscape or a community. How we repeat societal patterns over and over until they become calcified habits, no matter the damage.
And how change happens in spite of all that.
(You know. Breezy stuff.)
Read MoreFollowing is a list of six handy facts to use when people make, shall we say, uninformed comments about art and the economy, plus the cited sources of said facts.
Set folks straight, kindly, and with a smile on your face.
Read MoreI give you my final painting of and about the Water Valley community. The large brick building houses the B.T.C. and the tiny white awning is the Violet Valley bookstore.
This piece is emblematic of how the community has continued to evolve over the decades, or at least according to the stories that I've heard.
Read MoreIn 2015-16, I organized and coordinated Intertwine, a collaborative, large-scale yarn-bombing project on the two-story façade of ISU Design on Main community gallery (RIP Design on Main) in the Main Street Cultural District in Ames, Iowa.
Read MoreThis past summer, I had a show at the E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center, home of the Greenville Arts Council. As I was prepping for the exhibition, it occurred to me that I didn’t have any pieces of the Mississippi River itself.
Which is embarrassing and shameful, for the following reasons: 1) I’ve lived within 150 miles of this behemoth for 40 of my 45 years on the planet, and 2) the Mississippi River makes Greenville, Greenville.
Read MoreWhen I sent an informal survey asking people about third places, one of the responses was the Greenville Cypress Preserve, a 16-acre ecosystem right in town that has a couple miles of public walking trails.
Read MoreIf you live in the Driftless region of the Midwest, you hopefully know about Inspire(d) Media, a magazine I have been a fan of for years for obvious reasons.
I was real, real excited to be included both as the cover artist for their Summer 2024 issue and in a feature article inside.
Read MoreI made a short video about the creation of Ingrained Care, a painting inspired a conversation I had in 2019 with Drick Rodgers and Julia Rodgers Clark in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Watch the painting unfold and read the community story that inspired it.
Read MoreI made a short video about the early stages of Cultivation, a painting that’s based on a conversation I had in 2019 with Benjamin Saulsberry, Public Engagement and Museum Education Director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Read MoreIn 2011, Oskaloosa’s Skate and Bike Park broke ground. This urban park sits north of Penn Central Mall and downtown Oskaloosa and was funded by grants from the Tony Hawk Foundation, the MCRF, local donations, and young folks fundraising.
Read MoreLast spring, Arts Midwest invited me to host a really fun conversation with Amber Danielson, Melissa Bond, and Gabriella Torres, three really smart women who do meaningful, creative things in rural communities, for the Arts Midwest Rural Threads podcast and programming series.
Read MoreThe gradual evolution of A Beauty We Didn’t Expect, acrylic and tempera on wood panel, 36” x 48”, 2021.
The later stages, the slower the progress. It took me several minutes to detect the differences between images eight and nine. (They’re there, I promise.)
Read MoreI’m happy to report that I am contacted monthly, and increasingly weekly, by someone in Iowa who wants to begin a community mural project. The smallest community to date was a call from McIntire, Iowa (pop 122). The fact that more and more communities are finding value in community art projects fills me with joy.
Read MoreGet a peek at the inspiration behind and the unfolding of The Book Vault, the first painting of 2024…
Read MoreThis week’s interview continues to capture the creative and community-centered genius that Andy and Allison McGuire discover and harness in the Mahaska County communities through their work at George Daily Community Auditorium.
Read MoreBack in 2017, I had the very good fortune of meeting Allison and Andy McGuire, two talented and community-centered theatre-makers from the George Daily Community Auditorium in Oskaloosa, Iowa (population 11,463). The Auditorium had just been awarded an Arts Build Communities grant from the Iowa Arts Council to create Home Again, a multimedia variety show to explore and share the many stories of the Oskaloosa and Mahaska County communities.
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