Ecologist of art

SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: April 14, 1975, Ruination Day. New Orleans Family: Wife Karen, daughters Anna, 9, and Zoe, 1. We have another due in July!

The thing about my office is it is very bare.

One of my biggest art influences: Impossible to say. Too many.

Fantasy dinner guests: Bill Murray, Roberta Smith, N.T. Wright What’s always by my bed: My wife says books, papers, dirty clothes, magnets, glue, change, empty glasses, pencils and pens, photographs. A good, useful mess.

If I were marooned on a desert island, I’d have to have some good wreckage to work with.

A smell that makes me nostalgic: that old house smell, a combination of sandalwood, cedar, dust and Old Spice My biggest self indulgence: a dozen hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts or a sleeve of cookie dough An adventure I’ve always wanted to have: to travel, with ample money and no agenda I just finished reading and still digesting One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The secret to life is it’s no secret.

A word to describe myself: con-◊ictedBENTONVILLE - It started out innocently enough.

Dayton Castleman’s father would bring home a stack of accordion-style printer paper, the kind with a grid of green lines on one side and wide expanses of white on the other, and Dayton constructed worlds out of them by coloring, sketching, folding, tearing.

The habit crept into his books. No margin left behind, they were all filled with his doodling. Life in New Orleans presented a never-ending stream of colors and sensations that he longed to capture, and by the time he was in Judy Cruise’s high school art class in Tallahassee, Fla., he had an inkling of what was to come - art, making things, a world of playing, exploring and expressinghimself.

It’s what he does today as the museum manager for 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville, a business that is equal parts gallery, restaurant, hotel and entertainment center. It’s proof that the world is his oyster when he’s got a palette, something to build and a community in which to connect.

Castleman, 38, is responsible for making the cycle and progression of art exhibitions flow smoothly, from beginning to end. Some days that means art maintenance - cleaning the works, fixing the mechanical ones when they’re broken, or making sure the art is represented properly, by giving personal tours ofthe exhibits.

His touch at the whimsical museum, which favors modern, imaginative art more than historic and derivative, is a practical one behind the scenes and yet it’s work only an artist could make possible.

LIVING CREATIVELY

When he arrived at Belhaven College, now Belhaven University, as an art student, he had no idea that every perception he had of art and the process of creating it would be changed on that campus in Jackson, Miss.

It began one day after experimenting with a style that was entirely new to him. He hung a painting in the hallway where art students shared their works for others to consider, admire, or critique, and as he did, he grabbed professor Jon Whittington in passing toseek a professional opinion.

“It’s not good,” he said. Then, after pausing to reconsider, “It’s not good.”

It was a wake up call that art was not a free-floating, feel-good profession, that instead it was just like any other, one that required dedicated focus, thoughtfulness and adjustment.

“If I have any talents, they probably lie in art,” says Castleman. “But I had a pretty quick realization that you have to be smart and you have to be hardworking … hard work and curiosity and learning, those are things you can control. Even talented people have to do that.

“You can’t just make stuff and assume it’s going to be good or assume people are going to think it’s good.”

The tough love method was effective, and he got it from other instructors, too, like Kate Mills Irby, who taught his first collegiate painting class. To an outsider, their student-teacher relationship might haveseemed prickly, but she matched his stubbornness until he had the light bulb moment: You must work hard at art.

After that realization he applied his penchant for diving headstrong into new things and subjects to his art, and the result was the beginning of a continual cycle of inspiration, creation and critique.

“When he does something, he doesn’t do it lightly,” says his brother, Scott Castleman. “He puts everything into it. He’s a passionate guy, and when he’s in a project, there’s a singularity to his focus.”

The new environment of Belhaven helped, and immersed him in forms and styles of art he’d never encountered before. He was in Alice’s wonderland and the possibilities were endless.

Castleman learned to approach art with an open mind, and he rarely limits himself to using just one medium.

He built a career out of exploring art from every angle, and saved his sacred evening hours for creating his own pieces and connecting with other artists.

Soon after college, he went to work building crates and packing works at Atelier Art Services, a high-end art shipping and handling company in Philadelphia. It gave him experience in the delicate process of moving and hanging art for a variety of audiences, everyone from the private art collector to galleries and museums, and allowed him to always be surrounded by art and people who loved it.

It was a place for him to thrive, and the people he met there recognized a true streak of artistry in him.

“To be a successful artist, you have to have the itch and the willingness to scratch it whether people outside [of the art world] care, and he’s got it,” says Keith Crowley, a friend and former co-worker at Atelier.

Crowley recalls that Castleman couldn’t keep art out of his daily life, whether consciously or not, and found it flowing from him naturally, like the time he took home wood scraps from the company and returned them the next day in the shape of a toilet on display in the break room.

“I couldn’t figure out this absurd thing,” Crowley says. “He was a good painter, but I saw more of a love in materials and building things that existed versus painting. It just seemed there was more objects for fun, to shed light on exploration. Painting was something he knew he could do, but not the same level of passion for it.” THE CONNECTOR

Unleashed in the art world and no longer guided by the hand of professors and advisers, Castleman recognized the value of a ready-made community of young artists and decided to leverage it. He first made friends, who became connections, and about eight of them began meeting regularly to discuss art and provide constructive, honestfeedback on their latest creations.

He found that many artists his age were relieved to find a sounding board, and the group quickly surged to 10, then 15 before they found a space to harness their collective talent.

As the son of a minister, Castleman grew up in a community that was church-centered, and faith remains at the forefront of his life. So when he began searching for a way to bring his artists’ group together, he started with his connections at a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia. It had a dwindling congregation and the upper floors of the building were no longer used, so he seized the opportunity and negotiated a plan to turn the rooms into art studios.

The Church Studios made communication, critiques, friendships and partnerships easier with a central space for artists to gather when they weren’t working.

“He spearheaded that thing through relationships,” says Tim Gierschick, a former co-worker and one of the original Church Studios artists. “He’s a very good leader, and not all artists are that way.

“He brings enthusiasm, definitely. And probably more amounts of energy than I’ve ever seen. Very energetic.”

Castleman gets some of that energy out of connecting people, as he did at The Church Studios. Although he stayed only a few years before moving on to study sculpture in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, many of the original members stayed there for years as the collaboration expanded.

“He’s a connector in that he’s somebody who thrives on unifying two different people and that’s a real skill, a gift that he has of bringing together people who never knew one another before that and [come to] share something,” Crowley says. “Those people are [the ones] I ended up staying connected with and a big reason The Church Studios happened in the first place.’’

In terms of Castleman’s own art, the Studios refined, decluttered and solidified his creative process. Studio members showed him that though he was most comfortable with paints and a canvas, he was naturally a builder, a maker of things, a sculptor. When his creations got too “busy,” they’d help him prioritize and strip away the clutter.

More than anything, it revealed his natural instinct to recognize people’s true skills and interests and enable them to go further by helping them team up with others of a likemind.

“He knows who needs to be together and work together,” Scott Castleman says. “He identifies the kind of people who work well together and puts [them] in a room together for a common purpose. His ability is a rare trait.” CREATING ART COMMUNITIES

Castleman gets joy out of helping what he calls “art ecosystems” thrive, and his skill as a connector allows him to do that.

“All of these varying forms of life and systems … work together in a really complex, mutually supported and sustained relationship,” Castleman says. “Everything from [bottom to top], they all interrelate in one way or another. They’re distinct but they’re very much connected, they all rely on each other.”

In Chicago, he worked in Bridgeport, one of the many art-oriented neighborhoods that operated on a mutually supporting system among small businesses, art galleries, art centers, experimental community centers and creative journals, like Proximity.He began to see how these art worlds were constructed, and what made one entity depend on another and how different institutions could complement each other - all lessons that he would take to start grass-roots art communities elsewhere.

“You need your museums, you need those sort of monolithic institutions like the university. You need people who do art as a hobby and then you need communities of artists that are serious about what they do … who do guerrilla art shows and have [them] in their houses,” he says.

Dayton took his time and explored the art ecosystem, dipping himself into the galleries and home art exhibitions of Bridgeport, working as an art professor for a few years at Trinity Christian College and getting to know as many people in the community as possible.

Before he knew it, he found the perfect location for a grass-roots art movement in Northwest Arkansas. He and his wife, Karen, were expecting their second child when they began to consider moving to Bentonville to be near his parents in Siloam Springs, but they really couldn’t move without the assurance that there would be a museum of art with a strong, healthy collection within driving distance.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art sealed the deal for them.

It had gotten a lot of buzz from the press worldwide; upon their first visit they entered skeptical, and exited impressed, noting that it wasindeed the real thing.

For the first time in his adult life, Castleman would get to be a part of something entirely new - an art community that was built from the ground up. So he packed the family up and headed out to the art frontier.

He got a job at Phat Tire Bike Shop in downtown Bentonville to keep up his building technique, and landed a part-time education job at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where he learned how to play on the receptivity of the voluntary learner, something far removed from the dazed, homework-fearing college students he was accustomed to. Rather than lecturing, he was taught to instruct interactively, encouraging the audience of learners to arrive at their own conclusions.

“Our process is very involved in open-ended questions and encouraging young people to construct meaning together,” says Anne Kraybill, distance learning project manager at Crystal Bridges. “He brought the right attitude. I was really impressed with his ability to learn so quickly on the job.

“He brings with him a knowledge of art historical process and museums and galleries, but also an artistic … thought process.”

It was an amiable marriage of a deeply observant artist and the people person who made connections. Here were people who wanted to learn art. Here he was learning alongside them.

The arrival of 21c Museum Hotel was the chance to use what he’d learned as an artist and art consumer in developing new events to foster art discussion, poetry appreciation and family-oriented programming.

“What he’s doing in Arkansas is just like a perfectly natural extension of all the stuff I see him doing,” Crowley says. “I’m not surprised in the least.”

“It’s been fun to see him stretch his legs a bit, to take the risk to Northwest Arkansas and get in on the bottom floor of an art movement,” Scott Castleman says. “[It’s about] his desire to create, build, to make stuff, and that’s been neat to see him try to make it in a place where fine arts is somewhat new.”

Castleman is working hard to keep the base for the Arkansas art community strong and growing, breaking down the territorial attitudes between some regions and cities in favor of mutual support. He envisions artists in Arkansas sharing studios, gallery space, their knowledge, tools and connections, and creating a place where people are so passionate about their craft that they’re willing to share it in almost any context.

“We have not scratched the surface of what Northwest Arkansas will become when it comes to the arts,” he says. “It’s just the very beginning and that’s the exciting part. As much as is going on right now, it’s not a drop in the bucket compared to 10, 15, 25 years from now what this place is going to be like in terms of its influence.”