Walmartville

I knew that the first three weeks of May were going to be a whirlwind, and they're not even halfway over.

In truth it started earlier than May. In the last few weeks of April I tried to paint while also preparing the Hand of Man for its big month: May. I made a few repairs and improvements, notably installing an extra hydraulic cylinder on the wrist so it can pick up cars better (all the better to drop them with, my dear!).

About 10 days ago, the shows began; at that time I loaded the Hand onto a semi-truck bound for Bentonville, Arkansas. I then flew to Arkansas and installed it at the Scott Family Amazeum, an interactive children's museum. 

And then I did something I've never done before; I flew home... leaving it in the care of strangers! OK, well they are a bunch of nice and competent people who run the museum and its maker-space-like shop, and... they're not strangers anymore. I went home for a week while the Amazeum folks ran the Hand every day for a week-and-a-half, and then I flew back to Arkansas on the day before yesterday and yesterday morning we dismantled the Hand and put it back onto its pallets for its homeward journey later today. 

When it returns to New Mexico, it will sit on my land for about 5 days before I then load it onto another semi-truck bound for Las Vegas, Nevada, where I will run it at a giant corporate music festival called Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC). This is a 3-day event which has operational hours of 5pm to 5am (or 17:00 to 05:00 for you European folks!). I might be too old for that! Haha, we'll see. 

And during the same weekend that I am running the Hand at EDC, Christina and I will also have several sculptures installed at a great-sounding music festival happening in our hometown of Taos (called Monolith on the Mesa, being run by our friend Dano Sancho.) I have to install those sculptures before I leave for Vegas, which means they will be fully installed for several days before... and then several days after... the Monolith Festival. I would have loved to attend Monolith, because I think it will be fun, but everything happened all at once this year, and I guess that's how it is sometimes. 

On top of all that, I have a paying fabrication job in the shop that I'm trying to bang out in the spaces in between all this travel, which frankly isn't easy.

When it rains, it pours.

Bentonville Arkansas turns out to be a unexpectedly interesting place. When I first booked this show I thought... "Arkansas... ho-hum... it's gonna be boring." But North-West Arkansas, or NWA as they call it, is not boring. Bentonville is the home of Walmart, and the billionaire heirs and heiresses of Walmart's founder Sam Walton still live here. The entire town seems touched in one way or another by the Walton family fortune. The town is clean and well-taken care of, the culinary options are pretty damn good, and there is a truly world-class art museum here (more on that in a second), which all makes sense when you realize that Bentonville has the highest per-capita population of millionaires of any area in the entire USA. Amazing, but true (or at least that's what someone at the Amazeum told me.)

So it turns out that one of Sam Walton's heirs, his daughter Alice Walton, likes art. Well what do you do if you like art and you're a billionaire? You buy a lot of it. And then what do you do? You could stuff it all into your own home(s), or put it into storage, or... you could spend a few hundred million dollars on an art museum. Alice Walton has spent about $317 million of her own money to build the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, with an additional $800 million coming from the Walton Family Foundation. It's truly a beautiful and world-class museum, sitting in the middle of a town of 40,000 people in Arkansas. (Click the link above for some pictures of the place)

There's an awkward tension, if you think about it, between the daily reality of an average Walmart store, with it's underpaid workers and shitty products from China and its under-educated clientele (yes these are grotesque stereotypes, but relax... I shop there too sometimes) on the one hand, and this high-culture "bomb" that Alice Walton has dropped in the middle of Arkansas. When you consider that the museum entrance is free, and that the Walton Family Foundation is also doing a lot of other good things for the people of NWA, Alice Walton starts to look like some sort of inverted Robin Hood (instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, she is stealing from the poor and giving to Bentonville). Anyway it was very interesting to see farmers and other sorts of people who you would never imagine walking into an art museum strolling through Crystal Bridges. But it's free, and its in their town, so why not?

Here are a few of the pieces that I personally liked at the museum...

It turns out that Crystal Bridges isn't the only art-trick up Bentonville's sleeve. Another worthwhile destination is 21C, which is an interesting cross pollination between a hotel and a contemporary art gallery. The art here is considerably more cutting-edge than at Crystal Bridges, and is all privately owned by... you guessed it... some really rich people! At some point they had purchased too much art for their own home, so they opened this place. There are apparently eight locations around the South. By putting the art in a hotel which also features a popular restaurant, they too are exposing a slice of the populace to contemporary art who might otherwise never see it. If you're going to buy up all the good art, it's at least nice to share it. So... good job, all you obscenely rich people!

The show at 21C is called "The Future is Female" and here is some of the work...

(This one is my favorite piece in Bentonville)

And here are two more pieces I like, photographed from books...

Speaking of the female future, I continue to be interested in William Moulton Marston and his pop-culture creation, Wonder Woman. At this point I've watched the film version of his life as well as read a biography (and I can tell you that the film version portrays him very kindly.) The guy had some pretty wacky theories and somehow managed to live with three women simultaneously (which would take a lot of skill.. or charisma.. or something!), and he created this ultra-strong and ultra-feminist character who has stood the test of time for almost 80 years. His wacky theories include ideas that all human interactions are moderated by either domination or submission, that the world will be at peace when we all learn to enjoy submission, that women are stronger than men in part because they are better at submission, that women must teach men this skill, and that sexual power is one of the aspects of female superiority (sound familiar?). He was a psychologist during the early days of psychology. I think he would be laughed out of the professional world of psychology if he were alive today... and that's almost what happened to him back then too; before inventing Wonder Woman he was regarded as a self-aggrandizing quack and was professionally a quasi-failure. I think it would be interesting to look into HIS psychology, which I haven't seen anyone really do yet. It must be all about his mother...

Ironically I missed by two days the closing date of a special exhibition at Crystal Bridges focusing on the art world's reactions to Wonder Woman and SuperMan. There was an entire shelf of Wonder Woman books at their gift store...

With all this travel and work on my sculptures, I've not had time to paint. The last time I was in the painting studio was almost two weeks ago. At that time I had the following thoughts about my progress:
If you want to look at painting in an extremely reductivist way, it's about 1) mixing the right colors and 2) putting those colors in the right places. I'm doing OK with #2 in that equation, but not so great with #1. I've read that most of your time as a painter is spent at the palette, mixing colors... and I thought I'd been spending enough time there, but I'm clearly not. My skin tones are all over the place, and not very convincing. 

Her hand is too green, her face too red, and her skin tones are too dark overall... although to some degree I think this is a problem with my printer printing too dark (I'm printing parts of the source image for color matching.) And the sky is too blue, although that doesn't bother me.

Oh well, one of these days I will get back to it.

Funny enough, the big sculptures feel like my "job" right now, taking me away from what I want to be doing.. which is painting. 
I could have worse problems.

Oh and I discovered a painter I like, called Thomas Hart Benton. His subject matter doesn't do THAT much for me, but I love his technique.

OK... off to the Walmart Museum before I get on a plane!