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Sioux City Art Center exhibition asks, why make art?

PB&J #10 by Darren Maurer

 

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Sioux City Art Center's current facility. Its galleries have been used to present a wide range of art to the community, including works by local artists. One such exhibition opens this weekend, examining why innovators and creators in Sioux City devote themselves to the challenging endeavor of making art.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 ANN MARIE MCTAGGART: “It isn’t just drawing and painting. It is being able to express an emotion to somebody else.”

ALLY KARSYN: That’s Ann Marie McTaggart, one of 18 artists with works on display for the Sioux City Art Center’s three-month exhibition, “Creativity: Sioux City Style,” which recognizes the 20th anniversary of the Art Center moving into its current facility on Nebraska Street.

The new building opened up space to bring more attention to the accomplishments of local artists and show their work. Curator Todd Behrens carries on that tradition today.

BEHRENS: “I’ve been meeting with each of these artists to talk about their works and pick out examples for the show. I’ve asked each one of them to think carefully and clearly about one basic question and that is: why they do what they do. Why, out of all the possibilities that are available to them, why have they chosen to be a visual artist?”

RICH YATES: “I make art basically to satisfy my own curiosity. To answer questions like what does this mean? What if I try this? And can I do that? But I also want to get people to experience something new or experience something in a different way -- ultimately to get people to ask their own questions about what’s possible.”

DARREN MAURER: “I’ve won the Iowa Duck Stamp competition six times and have been the Iowa Duck’s Unlimited Artist of the Year twice. Now, although most people know me from that, that’s just a little sliver of what I do. The vast majority of my work does not include ducks. A few years ago, I was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and the sandwich was made. I cut it in half. It was sitting on a paper plate in the kitchen, and there was some light coming through the window. It was just lighting up that jelly like it was illuminated. I thought that is really cool. I thought that would make a great painting. I did put that on eBay, and it started getting bids like crazy. I mean it had about 40 bids on it within the first day. Sold for quite a bit of money for a 6-inch-by-6-inch painting. And so I thought, huh, maybe I’m onto something. So I did another one. Same thing happened.”

MARK BOWDEN: “Art to me is not a craft. It isn’t a hobby. It’s not a job. It’s something you have to do. I basically create because my mind won’t let me rest unless I do. I have all these ideas all the time. You have to get it out. It’s a curse, and it’s a blessing in a lot of ways too. It’s just something that’s a part of you.”

AMY FOLTZ: “My father was an amateur sculptor, and my mother was a singer. There wasn’t a lot of intellectual stimulation as to what is art and the philosophy of it. It was just these are objects, these are things of beauty and you too can make things of beauty, and so, OK, I can make things of beauty. I was told I could do it, so if that’s what I could do, then we go forward to the highest degree possible.”

STEPHEN HAAS: “I consider myself to be one of the blessed few who found my ‘it,’ my thing that I can’t not do, the thing that you’re born to do. I didn’t want to be an artist. I didn’t strive to become an artist. I was born an artist. I didn’t go to college until I was in my early 40s. I didn’t know it at the time, but man, I should have heard angels singing when I stepped foot on that campus. I loved college.”

MCTAGGART: “In high school, the art instructor wanted me to go to the Minnesota Art Institute, but my mother, since my father was killed in the war, she wanted me to go and to have a career I could take care of myself. Nursing was the career she wanted me to do. I was in it for 35 years. Going to school again is like a gift. It’s a gift to be able to express myself with my art.”

YATES: Lately, with my interactive art, I’ve been exploring how people react to my art and how my art can react to people. This has done something kind of different, unexpected. But it’s changed the relationship between my artwork and those viewing it, essentially creating a different way of experiencing that art.”

MAURER: “I’m driven to make art. I don’t do the paintings to sell ‘em. That’s not the purpose of painting. I would keep on painting even if I wasn’t selling the work. Every painting is still a struggle for me. I think it’s the challenge of starting with a blank canvas. You’ve got some blobs of paint on a palette and some brushes and somehow you have to apply that paint to the canvas that means something.”

BOWDEN: “There’s no rules in art. You can be your own person. You don’t have to follow guidelines or anything. Whatever you put out there, that is yourself. It’s you that you’re putting out. It’s really weird when you show or exhibit -- a person told me this a long time ago, he says, ‘You know, it’s like you’re standing naked out there. ‘Cause everybody can see what you’re about by what you produce.’ And there’s a lot to that. It’s intimidating.”

FOLTZ: “I get an idea and I try to manifest it as something. It takes longer to manifest an idea than it does to think it up. I like ideas of beauty. I see beauty around me, and I see ugliness around me. It’s hard to find a balance in life. It’s like making something beautiful is what I start out with and the idea is always smaller than what the result is.”

HAAS: “You know the theme of what I’m doing or the ‘body of work’ or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. My immediate environment and the art itself -- it becomes my world for that time I’m doing it. If I’m working on a big project, where it takes several days or several weeks or a couple months to do, I carry that out of the studio. I take that with me. When I’m working, I’m really me.”

 

An opening reception for “Creativity: Sioux City Style” will be held at the Sioux City Art Center this Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

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