Review

A Jewel in the Midwest

by Rachel Epp Buller

Unexpected. A rare find. A treasure. All these describe the cutting-edge contemporary art scene in Salina, Kansas. The mission of the Salina Art Center, “to create exchanges among art, artists and audiences that reveal life,” is embodied in a diverse slate of exhibitions, artist initiatives, programming, and education that have earned the Art Center national recognition.

Founded in 1978, the Salina Art Center comprises three campuses. The galleries, located in the historic downtown at 242 South Santa Fe, include exhibition space and an interactive education space called The Artery. One block north is the Art Center Cinema, a fantastic community resource that features many foreign and independent films in a weekly changing schedule. The newly renovated Warehouse on Fourth Street is a living and working space for visiting regional, national, and international artists-in-residence, and an open space for expanded educational programs.

The Salina Art Center, which is a non-collecting museum, presents five to six exhibitions per year, at least one of which has an outreach component (see Heather Ferrell’s discussion of Snapshots, in her interview later in this article). As a community-based organization, the Art Center staff works closely with advisory committees to create exhibition schedules, develop programming, and find connections between artists and the regional community. Recent exhibitions have ranged from traveling exhibitions such as New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India to those organized in-house such as last summer’s Suburban / Domestic: The Nature of Love and Family.

Over the past two years, the Art Center has developed a series of remarkable artist initiatives that have mixed emerging and established, regional and national artists. The artist-in-residence program aims to increase opportunities for in-depth community interaction with artists. Last fall, painter Jon Rappleye was artist-in-residence in conjunction with his exhibition Strange World. Upcoming artists-in-residence include Matthew Burke, Max Carlos Martinez, and Carrie Scanga. Artist at Work, held three times a year, continues the theme of community involvement. Visiting artists give presentations on their work then facilitate a community discussion of professional development topics and have brought Hildur Bjarnadóttir, Luis Gispert, and Mark Dion to Kansas, for example. Artist Exchange is a mentoring program that enables regional professional and emerging artists to meet, teach, and learn together, and it culminates in a final exhibition each year.

The current exhibition, on view at the Salina Art Center through August 10, 2008, explores the process and versatility of a specific medium. Leaded: The Materiality and Metamorphosis of Graphite looks closely at a group of international artists all using the same material but in divergent and sometimes unrecognizable ways. The exhibition’s sub-themes make clear its diversity: graphite as content, graphite as transformative agent, and graphite as sculpture, a category best represented by Michael Joaquin Grey’s Weather Report, a 250-pound disk of solid graphite, 50-inches in diameter, with drawings incised on its surface. Exhibitions at the Salina Art Center are always well worth a visit, and Leaded is no exception.

AN INTERVIEW WITH HEATHER FERRELL
Excerpts from an e-mail interview with Heather Ferrell, Executive Director / Curator of the Salina Art Center

REB: Salina appears to have an unusually supportive arts community, more than many larger cities. To what do you attribute that? Can you describe the role of community involvement in the Art Center?

HF: Yes, Salina, Kansas, is a remarkable place for the arts and has a vibrant community for a town of 48,000. The Salina Art Center could not be as successful as it has been without the supportive network of other cultural agencies and groups that help it flourish. The Art Center was founded in 1978 — the Salina Arts and Humanities Commission began about that same time offering financial support to art programs, and then through the years more groups connected and grew, so that today, we have the Steifel Performing Arts Theatre, the Salina Community Theatre, the Smoky Hill Museum, Kansas Wesleyan’s Gallery, the Smoky Hill Festival (which is put on by the SAHC), and several art galleries in town. The community of Salina is very supportive and extremely philanthropic in terms of private support for the arts. People enjoy their lives in Salina, and they want to enrich it as much as they can, and they know they can do this through the arts.

I would say the community is very involved with the Art Center — although there is always room for growth and connections. Because we are community-based and work closely with advisory groups (for exhibitions, residencies, warehouse, cinema, education) and volunteers (nearly 300) for our numerous events, open houses, cinema, and programs, we have a level of involvement quite enviable compared to other similar institutions. Many of our trustees and volunteers are leaders in the community, and they are active advocates for what we do at the Art Center. One of our goals at the Art Center is to better share the model that has developed over the years with other organizations, because we have found it successful, and without this type of support you could not have a contemporary art center in the middle of Kansas.

REB: Describe some of the innovative programming you’ve designed related to recent exhibitions.

HF: One innovative program that I developed with my staff was Snapshots: Lives in Transition. Snapshots was a project I developed while a curator in Idaho, and it was designed to give at-risk students from a local high school an opportunity to explore, express, and share their lives through photography, text, and other media. This program introduces students to contemporary artists and photography by allowing them to photograph their lives and then write about their experiences with corresponding journal entries. For this project our curator of education works with local artists and students over a 16-week period to combine photographs and text to create two- and three-dimensional artworks, which are then shown at the Art Center as a culminating community exhibit tied into our First Thursday Art Rush.

Most recently, for our exhibition New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India, we formed an advisory committee of teachers, university faculty, trustees, and community liaisons to work with staff to help design programs that would create a point of entry for people to a culture and to artists for which few would have an immediate connection or context to understand their work. As a result of this committee and of partnerships with businesses, universities, and local groups, we were able to offer over 20 programs in conjunction with this show as part of a “Passport to India,” including yoga in the galleries, the movie Vanaja at our cinema, cooking classes, and discussions on spiritual beliefs and specific artists that were led not just by staff but by community members. Also, due to the size of New Narratives, we sought a partner in Kansas Wesleyan University to help exhibit some of the work on their campus and to collaborate on programming — strengthening a partnership we have been nurturing with them these past several years. The show’s curator, Betty Seid, when she came to speak about the show in February, was delighted by the depth of programming and how invested a small community such as Salina became in the exhibition and art of India. ~

NOTE
Heather Ferrell had directed the SAC since September 12, 2005, and recently accepted the position of executive director of the Salt Lake Art Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Salina Art Center
242 South Santa Fe
Salina, Kansas 67401
785-827-1431
www.salinaartcenter.org

Rachel Epp Buller is a freelance artist and art historian who is currently involved in the Artist Exchange program. She has a Ph.D. in art history, is raising three small children, and in recent bits of free time has contributed to Woman’s Art Journal, German Studies Review, and various anthologies such as Mothering in the Third Wave.

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