Public art adds color, culture to center city area

If you remember your first reading primer, the words were really big, like the word "LOOK." It's amazing how often I fail to "look." I mean, I see things, but I don't look at them, comprehend them, become aware of them, and I walk right by them.

So it's no surprise that when I recently took a walking tour of downtown Springfield and looked at it from an appreciative point of view, I was astonished. There's art everywhere!

What prompted me to take the tour, camera in hand, was the man teetering on a scaffold, 20 feet up, paintbrush in hand. David Guinn is hard to miss, painting his mural on the west side of the Har-Bell Athletics building at Park Central West and Campbell Street.

Guinn, from Philadelphia, holds a bachelor of arts with an architecture emphasis from Columbia University and will be here another month or so finishing the basketball-themed mural. It's part and parcel of the Springfield Program for Public Arts, which has murals all over the downtown area. Guinn's mural will be dedicated Sept. 16 at a street dance downtown.

The public arts program started in Springfield in December 1999, according to Ellen Baird, director of the program. "Its purpose is to implement aspects of the cultural plan, and to use public art to break down the barriers and to put art out in the public where it's accessible to everybody in the community."

The program is community-based and has developed with the help of the Springfield Area Arts Council and many other organizations, such as the Junior League of Springfield, and individuals like Ellen and Andrew Baird, whose building at 405 W. Walnut St. houses the program.

So far, six murals have been painted, Baird said, the idea being to "promote civic pride and create a dialogue as to art education programs, and of course, with beautification as the end result."

Getting schoolchildren excited about art is key. At the end of the last school year, a mural was completed with their help just west of where Guinn's mural is being painted.

Funded by a grant from the Missouri Arts Council, the mural was painted by an artist-in-residence, David Loewen-stein, from Lawrence, Kan., and 12 students from Bailey Alternative School.

"The design came from their discussions and their ideas and photographs," Baird said. "It was a fantastic project."

As a result of the artistic energies that have gone into the program, murals are everywhere downtown.

In my hour's walk, I found plenty of artwork on building walls, not all of it murals, but all the same, wonderful to view.

Robert E. Smith has a mural on the Corner Printing building at Walnut and Campbell, Baird has one she painted on the east side of the McDaniel Building, and the Sounds of Springfield are remembered as music history on the wall of the Storefront School in the old Mulholland Building on Water Street across from Founders Park.

Besides murals painted as part of the public arts program, there is a wonderful fantasy painting on the east side of the Dungeons of Doom building at Walnut and Campbell; an exotic Oriental-mystical scene that covers the whole side of the building east of the Springfield Brewing Company; and there's a tile mosaic another public arts program project on the south end of the Wheeler's Building at McDaniel and South. It was created by Jennifer Smith and Nathan Falter of Springfield pottery. A |amp| B Cycle Shop's sign is pretty nifty, too.

Artist Christine Schilling has headed a mosaic project that is slated to be installed this month on College Street in the West Central neighborhood. That project was in collaboration with the Missouri Probation and Parole Department.

Baird will start a new mural on the north side of the downtown YMCA building, probably in the spring, that will honor Southwest Missouri State University's Lady Bears and Jackie Stiles.