EUREKA SPRINGS - This “artrageous” community with a population of a couple of thousand people easily doubles in size during weekends in May, when the city’s May Festival of the Arts blooms along on the city’s streets and inside its eclectic galleries. Up to 60 different events are scheduled.
This year’s celebration, the city’s 26th, introduces two new and offbeat projects: photographer John Rankine’s “Mugs,” a poster-size collection of images of local artists making goofy faces, and The Sphere, a giant ball made of painted sticks, conceptualized and under construction by artist Robert R. Norman. Both works were produced by Jeremy Mason McGraw and his Creative Energy Project.
“In Eureka Springs, we take art very seriously,” reads the satirical tag line for the 130 “Mugs” photos. The 4-by-2 ½-foot posters will be plastered all over town, Rankine said. Further into the festival, patrons will be invited to put graffiti on the posters (nothing graphic, please).
“To me, it’s exciting when you can see it on the streets,” Rankine said, “and I thought it would be a great celebration of our unique art community.”
The hardest part was getting the artists to take the time to have their photos made. Rankine “shot” them in front of a blank wall in front of his store, Sweet Spring Antiques.
“They spent 20-30 seconds at the most, and it was usually the first shot or the last shot that made the cut,” he said. A poster containing all 130 shots will be for sale during the month-long festival.
Over the past few months, Norman, The Sphere creator, invited residents and tourists to paint and write on sticks, which he will use to create his sculpture. The community sphere, about 7 feet in diameter, will be revealed during a party in Basin Park around dusk on Saturday.
McGraw described the sculpture as having multiple “personalities.” To look at it from far away, it appears blue at the bottom, fading into magenta at the middle, then gold at the top.
“When you get closer to it, you can see all these messages that people wrote - intricate notes and drawings and things like that,” he said. For yet a different perspective, the sticks are coated with a clear ultraviolet glaze, so when a black light hits them, they glow with color. The inside will hold an array of LED lights that are constantly changing color. The big sphere will be in Basin Park downtown in place of the fountain, which will be removed for the festival and returned to its spot in June. There will be several smaller spheres with it.
“It’ll be quite an amazing thing to look at at night,” McGraw said.
The messages on the wood range from poems and love notes to simple drawings and one forlorn “goodbye” from a Eureka Springs student who is moving from the area. All the wood was reclaimed from the city’s parks - fallen tree limbs and branches that the artist cut up, sanded down and prepared for painting.
“Part of the platform that Robert Norman was on with this is that he wanted to show you can make really cool things that people overlook or throw away,” McGraw added.
The Sphere’s lighting ceremony will be followed by drummers including by Angelo Yao, a native of the Ivory Coast and a popular Eureka Springs dancer and noisemaker.
Earlier on Saturday, McGraw will reign as grand marshal of the Artrageous Parade at 2 p.m., one of two parades that day (the other is for PT Cruiser collectors) and one of the biggest the city has all year.
“They call it Artrageous for a reason,” says watercolor artist Zeek Taylor, a member of the Eureka Springs Arts Council, which organizes and plans the festival. “Everybody tries to be outrageous.”
While many of the events are scheduled for the first weekend, many more are scheduled through the month. On May 17, beginning at 4 p.m., the 23rd annual White Street Art Walk is expected to draw 1,000 or more visitors to White Street and its side streets. For a six-hour stretch from afternoon into evening, artists greet art lovers on Eureka Springs’ upper historic loop, giving gawkers a look beyond their porches and stoops. The annual affair was organized by Taylor, of 12 White St., and fellow Memphis College of Art expatriates Eleanor Lux, Mary Springer and John Robert Willer. Lux owns Lux Weaving Studio, and the work of painters Springer and Willer is featured at WilloSpring Gallery of Fine Art.
Saturday gallery strolls are scheduled, as well as “Meet the Artist ” receptions at several restaurants, including the Cottage Inn and DeVito’s Restaurant.
More information is available at eurekaspringsfestivalofthearts.com.
Style, Pages 47 on 04/28/2013