Bubble-gum Cameos, Pop-tab Cars, and Kansa the Buffalo
by Aubrey Streit
Posted: September 24, 2007
Just to know I got something that somebody else don’t
have that’s one thing that makes me feel good.
—Herman Divers
Rosie Cowan is petite, a sprite. Her cropped gray
hair shows off her earrings, luminescent red apples. She just met
me, but she doesn’t hesitate to yank my wrist when my gaze
wanders over her shoulder.
I’m looking through the glass door of the gallery at the
empty Saturday morning main street of Lucas, Kansas. Outside, it’s
a sunny day in January. Inside, Rosie waves her newspaper at me.
She is explaining how she bought her buffalo. She has snatched up
the “Kansas Traveler” section to show me a picture of
it. But her hands haven’t yet slowed enough for me to glimpse
the tiny article.
I can’t get a word in to point this out. She’s saying,
“And when we went inside the gallery in Taos—Taos is
so far-out, just far-out—we said we were interested in the
buffalo outside, but the owner wasn’t there so the clerk called
him and Wendell heard him say, ‘There’s a couple from
Kansas here who is seriously crazy.’”
***
When I had entered the Grassroots Art Center earlier that morning,
it seemed deserted. I’d originally planned to stop in Lucas
to see the Garden of Eden, an outdoor collection of biblically themed
concrete sculptures and a few gargoyles. But the Garden didn’t
unlock its gates until ten. Cruising around town, I could find nothing
open except a highway café and this gallery.
The gallery’s yellowed limestone blocks looked warm. The
door was unlocked. Inside the building, though, it was dark and
quiet. I walked back outside to check the opening hours posted on
the front. It was exactly nine a.m.
A woman in a white turtleneck and crocheted sweater vest emerged
from the back. As she flipped light switches to illuminate the high
ceiling’s embossed tin tiles, Rosslyn, the director of the
center, asked me where I was from.
I told her Tipton, a place like this, surrounded by sloping pastures
and flat fields. But I hadn’t been to Lucas since I was little.
“Not too much has changed,” she replied, “but
I’d be happy to give you a tour.”
The center collected local folk art, Rosslyn explained. It also
hosted traveling art shows and was the home of the Eccentric Kansans
Conference. The keynote speaker talked about preserving the shop
of a Texas man who made orange sculptures: the fruit, not the color.
“It was very educational,” Rosslyn said, grinning at
the tassels of her loafers. We entered the first room of the gallery
and approached a rotating clump of junk with plastic shoots, something
like an unnatural houseplant. When a lake in Los Angeles was drained,
John Woods hired homeless men to pick up the debris. He fastened
everything—including syringes, false teeth, and part of a
bomb—into this structure and put it on a circulating pedestal
for display.
Eccentrics, I learned, putter and tinker. Like Herman Divers, a
Topeka native who would come home from work every day and piece
together pop tabs—this was when you could pull the tabs off
completely and wrap them around each other. He would stop each night
after the thin metal opened slits in his skin. Yet the work added
up: he made a whole car out of sheets of interlinking tabs, along
with an umbrella, a motorcycle, and a parade costume. He might never
have stopped, except that he ran out of tabs. The right kind was
only produced for about seven years. So now he strings buttons together
into similar sheets.
These people are different from professional artists, who usually
submit to public criticism in order to make a career. Grassroots
artists work alone in their basements for years, accumulating things
in private, driven by something as pure, I suppose, as self-satisfaction.
Like Inez Marshall, who made a two hundred pound birdhouse, or the
Fort Hays State University janitor who made art objects with refuse
salvaged from Dumpsters outside of dorms. Leroy Wilson’s wife
just gave him the basement to paint and repaint after he retired.
For twelve years he relentlessly layered fresh colors, designs,
coat on top of coats.
He’s dead now, but I still wonder how he would have felt
if he saw the piece of his basement wall—cut out, carried
up into the light, and hung on this wall. Would he have climbed
back down his cellar stairs, clutching the chipped handrail, carrying
Joseph’s coat inside his head, routine unfazed?
Would you hesitate to flick the switch on that darkness?
We looked at Betty Milliken’s chewing gum cameos, faded pink
coins with bulbous noses and tiny painted eyes. “How do you
find these people?” I asked.
“Word of mouth.”
“And then you just give them a call?”
“We can’t afford to miss our chance. When we called
Betty, we had just lost the cigarette-butt guy.”
These people make objects out of everyday things—not just
because concrete and junk and chewing gum are cheap, but because
they’re there. They work with what they know. Maybe this is
why John Woods, the lake dredger, calls himself a historian, not
an artist.
The tour and our conversation stretched across Lucas. As we left
the gallery and walked down the middle of the street to the Deeble
house, Rosslyn told me that Mrs. Deeble’s miniature concrete
landscapes in the backyard weren’t art to Mrs. Deeble. They
were simply places she visited (Estes Park, Colorado) and imagined
(a version of Mount Rushmore with the faces of Lucas’s founding
fathers, including a famous woman opera singer).
As we stood and pondered what this woman left behind in the world,
I realized that Mrs. Deeble probably just wanted to look out her
door and be able to say, “I did something.”
“Exactly,” said Rosslyn.
On the other side of the door, small Victorian rooms were covered
first by what seemed to be tin foil—actually silver insulation—and
then hundreds of pieces of art by Mri Pilar. Each was essentially
a reassembly, a reimagination of trinkets and trash. In my favorite,
a disembodied Barbie head with feathers enhancing the blonde hair
was joined to the body of a pebbly blue brontosaurus.
I think I had this exact dinosaur as a kid. I turn to tell Rosslyn,
but she’s looking past me. She doesn’t hear.
***
On the walk back, we meet children playing in the road, and both
of us greet them. The tour should be finished now. But Rosslyn is
going to gather some literature and contact information for me,
and I want to dawdle through the side gallery one last time.
I’m scrutinizing the cameo collection for Betty’s
teeth marks when I hear the front door open and a voice cry, “Where
have you been?”
I think the question is addressed to Rosslyn, until I’m
sucked into the whirlpool eyes of Rosie Cowan. She doesn’t
wait for me to reply. “Come meet my husband Wendell,”
she says.
Soon I’ve learned it’s Rosie and her sister Barbie
that help collect things for Mri Pilar’s pieces, and Rosie
has circled back to buying a buffalo in Taos. She wants me to visit
the Cowan Corral, home of Kansa—a giant fiberglass buffalo
decorated with the state seal.
The words of the Taos gallery clerk echo in my head: “There’s
a couple from Kansas here who is seriously crazy.” Rosie related
them with such glee and pride.
“Where are you parked?” Rosie demands. “Do you
want to follow us out?”
“No, I can’t,” I say, then turn down Rosie’s
repeated invitation to hop in her SUV.
I push open the door. Rosslyn reminds me to be in touch. Rosie
hollers at me to come back.
Of course I will.
___
|
