Citizen Journalist: Columbia, once again, looks out of state for local art

by Mike Martin

October 6,2007

When the City of Columbia decided to acquire public art for the new Daniel Boone Building from one of three artists — none of whom lives anywhere near Missouri — I scratched my head.

In a community seeking to establish itself as a regional arts hub, sending $200,000 out of state sends a discouraging message. "Support your local economy" seems to apply to the private, but not the public sector, notorious for its forays into non-local vendors of every stripe, while in a perennial pique about dwindling sales tax receipts.

The message also seems mixed, especially in a college town with a public university that supports in-state students with lower tuition and favorable admissions. In-state artists like David Spear and Joel Sager are widely hailed; they shine on the covers of our high-stepping lifestyle magazines and adorn many large-scale private projects. Spear and southern Boone County sculptor Don Asbee also received a modest commission — about $6,000 each — to create art for the Wabash Station.

Although opportunities may exist for smaller projects in the new $25 million city government center, in-state artists are virtually shut out of Columbia's most visible and important new project.

Regional sensibilities

Admittedly, creating art for a new city hall is a large-scale endeavor. Columbia may have few, if any, local artists who can handle it, one local gallery owner surmised.

But Hartsburg's own Don Asbee is one of the nation's finest artistic blacksmiths, with metalwork on display at The Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, the St. Louis Zoo, and the Kellogg Cereal Co. in Battle Creek, Mich. City Hall hardly seems out of his league.

More importantly, however, the city's decision to seek public art in Philadelphia, New Mexico and Massachusetts belies the spirit — from a historical perspective — of Missouri art generally.

Practitioners from Mark Twain and Eugene Field to George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton were infused with a sense of the psychological, spiritual and physical domains of their Missouri surroundings.

In broad and unforgettable strokes fully formed by their distinctive regional sensibilities, they commented on the powerful and often-conflicting role the state plays on the American stage. Twain's literature is an unmistakable illustration. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one can read the most biting condemnation of racism in the history of the American pen, so fresh and charged it remains controversial even today.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote. "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

And it came from just up the highway, in Hannibal.

The same artistic sensibility about Missouri's unique identity exists in Columbia. You can see it in the languid lines of Spear's Addison's series and the brightly primitive colors of a Sager still life. You can see it on Chris Teeter's now-famous Orr Street Studios doors and in Greg McNutt's "Missouri Life" black-and-white photograph series, all shadow and mist with light peeking through every crevice and pore.

You can see it in a Missouri River sunset off the docks at Cooper's Landing and in the eyes and faces of life-long Missourians.

At City Hall, on the other hand, you will see art created by artists who can only "glean something of what the community is interested in," New Mexico-based artist Howard Meehan, the project's designee, told local reporters recently.

Abstract pithiness
One hopes Meehan's potentially incomplete grasp of public sentiment doesn't lead to outcries like those that erupted over designs at the library and the ARC, or those that helped defeat the recent library tax.

Grandly planned but ultimately bland, much of today's public art seems aimed at large-scale abstract pithiness. The result is often to leave the soul starved for a connection with the public and the public sector: our elected and appointed representatives, and the work they do on our behalf.

In the wake of countless public tragedies and travesties of late, from falling bridges to leaders falling in public disgrace, that much-needed connection seems more distant and we more alienated from it, something rightly anathema to the spirit of artistic creation and the spirit of artistic Missourians.

Columbia resident and science journalist Mike Martin earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Washington, with a concentration in entrepreneurship and innovation. He can be reached at mike.martin@nasw.org.

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