Art Splash will bloom in Riverside Park this weekend. Though the festival has over its 22 years become an institution unto itself, few people know that it is a juried show, with artists from around the country sending their applications each year. This ensures not only that the art on hand is of top quality, but that the scene stays fresh, giving Siouxlanders cause to come back each year with renewed excitement.
With participatory projects, games, and crafts, children and entertainment seekers alike look forward to the show. And this year, those attractions include music by Massive Brass Attack, Potts and Pans Steel Band, the Sioux City Conservatory of Music, and the Titans of Industry.
Behind the festivities stands the Sioux City Art Center, which has just come off its hugely successful Jackson Pollock exhibition. The excitement caused by Mural's stay has been expertly parlayed into two exhibitions of local artists: Bill Welu and John Bowitz. Welu's work, like Pollock's, demands depth of the viewer, but it is, otherwise, the other side of experience. Where Pollock is frenetic, phsysically active, always pressing into the next line, the next moment, Welu is still, meditative, serene.
The exhibition of Bowitz's works reveals a searching not within one idea, but within all the ideas of a lifetime. Each idea demands a new approach, a new form. It is "Mural" plus time and space and material. And it, like the Welu exhibition, is up until October 25.
