a visit to WAM

During a break from my recent consulting gig in Kansas, I traveled from Garden City to Wichita, via my old teaching venue (Sterling College). Returning to Kansas, and especially taking the trip from GC via K-156 to Larned and then K-19 to K-14 just south of Sterling always kindles a cornucopia of emotions for me. This time those emotions were stirred in an unexpected way.

I left GC about 9:00 a.m. on Friday the 13th, reaching Larned about 10:40. Before going into Wendy's for a break, I happened to notice the headline in the Hutchinson News, the dominant print news voice in Western KS. It recalled the Clutter murders in Holcomb KS (just 7 miles West of GC) exactly fifty years ago--Nov. 15, 1959. I had studied these murders at some length a while back, and was I brought back to that study and to my KS time in that one instant. I devoured each word of the articles, from the original story in the GC paper to contemporary interviews with some of those close to the crime in 1959. Then, I read other sections of the paper and realized that I knew one of the people who would be performing a "free concert" in Sterling (Sterling was famous for those)--she grew up right across the street from our family in Sterling. I also noted the opening of an exhibit at the Hutchinson Art Association and decided to take that in when I returned from Wichita. I thought I might run into someone from the church where my ex-wife was pastor in the 1990s. Indeed, I did, and was brought into some details of life in the intervening 15 years in that town.

When arriving in Sterling, about an hour East of Larned, I decided just to circle the old neighborhood and then head into Wichita. But I noted a most unusual and welcome sight--an Internet (free!) coffee house. The bumper stickers on the wall and ambience of the place told me it was a "treehugger, anti-military, birkenstock-wearing" place, which was pretty unusual for Sterling KS. I settled into a seat and opened my life and my heart to some work before me. Rarely have I felt so liberated in my life--no responsibility at all, and knowing no one, but in a town that took a part of me and left a greater part from 1990-93 (we moved to Hutchinson in Dec. 1993).

At The WAM

Wichita is about another 70 minutes SE of Sterling, and when I finally arrived there it was well into the afternoon. I headed eventually to the Wichita Art Museum, and there I was confronted not only with an attractive exhibit on three generations of the Wyeths (NC, Andrew, Jamie), but with an unexpected cavalcade of emotions as I saw pictures there that themselves conjured up not simply the artists but my feelings when I saw them for the first time 17 or 18 years ago. The WAM was the first art museum that became a friend for me, and my frequent visits to it in the early 1990s coincided with my aching desire to learn all about 300-400 artists and their works, as part of my "filling out" the deficiencies of my general education. I drank in the paintings, and so as I saw Robert Henri's Eva again, or George Bellows' The Skeleton or one of Mary Cassatt's famous Mother and Child's or Horace Pippin's West Chester PA. But I saw them not only as pieces in their own right, but as pieces that stirred the passions that I felt for them when I saw them in the early 1990s. I felt 40 again (I hit 40 in 1992), but without all the baggage attendant upon the actual experience of being 40.

When I first saw the WAM collection of Americana I felt that it was an exceedingly good collection, despite its small size. As if to confirm this, I discovered that a lot of the collection had become a traveling exhibit in the late 1990s and thereby grew in stature as it traveled. I picked up the catalog/book of that traveling exhibit and was even more delighted to find rich descriptions of the paintings, along with a few general interpretive essays in the front. Wichita had placed itself on the Americana art "map" about a decade ago, but I was privileged to see and absorb it long before the rest of the world did. I realized for the first time how much care went into building the collection at the WAM, and that rather than tyring to get several works of any one artist, the idea was to get representative pieces from almost each major artist and many pieces from "lesser" figures. For example, one of the pieces (in the book, though I don't remember seeing it on the walls) illustrating the Precisionist movement in American art around the Depression era was Ralston Crawford's Section of a Steel Plant. Just reading the description brought back to mind the richness of artistic description and the allure of the images.

Time would fail me to say how my emotions were stirred upon looking at the John Quidor miniature, or on a few of colonial artist Robert Feke's portraits or an eerie Charles Burchfield picture or John Steuart Curry's famous Kansas Cornfield, which was the first acquisition of the WAM in the 1930s. Each image brought me back to my troubled era of the 1990s, but without any of the personal baggage. Now the baggage of the 1990s is gone, and I see things with a spirit and energy and clarity nurtured by 15 years of healing and re-invigorated ambition. And, I needed to go to the WAM to become reacquainted not only with the pictures but with myself. That, indeed, was the most precious gift of all..

4168