Art Center Hubbub
Art Center Hubbub
One of my buddies asked me, after about our 2nd pint, why Stanwoodopolis wanted to build an Art Center. Hadn’t we artists done enough damage already? Mostly he was joking, tweaking me as usual, but on some level he really did wonder why we would spend 13 million dollars on a building for art. I’m sure he’s not alone. There are plenty of folks who not only could live without art in their lives, they’d prefer it. Ralph is one of these. He just doesn’t need it. His life, if you asked him, is full and I’d be the last guy to suggest he could make it fuller. Especially after 2 IPA’s on empty stomachs.
Ralph isn’t the first — and won’t be the last — person to ask why we want to build an Art Center in Stanwoodopolis or anywhere else. I make my living doing public art, parking large glass murals in new public architecture. You bet I get angry taxpayers asking why their hard-earned money should be spent on art. And so, over the years, at countless dedications, I’ve had to justify adding art to the architecture the Ralphs think are just fine without extra flourishes. For a new elementary school in Kent in front of hundreds of kids and their teachers, I gave this explanation:
People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers? It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake here in Kent, we were in the old school. It was falling apart and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, state of the art teaching equipment, books and computers. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.
But the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.
I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.
I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or caterpillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.
But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.
And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.
Well, maybe if Ralph and I had ordered another round … I might have laid this on him. But we called it a night before I could get up on that pulpit. Sure, we might have flown home on new wings but instead we just drove our beat up rigs back home, saved beating our wings.
Tags: Art in Architecture, Meyer Art Center in Stanwood, What Good is Art?