Facebook postings have begun to include photos of shrubs, flowers, and flowering shrubs. Most of these are of the oh-joy-spring-is-here-and-look-what-I-see-in-my-garden variety. Yes, literally the garden variety.
Folks here, or the lawn services they hire, have begun making the mowing and trimming founds, which reminded us at Kearney Creates of the entry we posted some time ago on Yard Art. As the yards shed their last little mounds of shaded snow, those yard art pieces began to show too.
Or, maybe not, since they aren’t all in the street-facing yard. Many are in folks’ backyards, often fenced in by white plastic, chain-link, brick, stone, or wood fences, or borders of bushes. Some of that art is so valuable that its owner wouldn’t want to risk a drive-by theft. Here and elsewhere, a good deal is securely kept within the owners’ homes.
Just as the neighborhoods are coming to life again, thanks both to nature and the sprucing up that comes with Spring, our Museum of Nebraska Art has announced that the exterior renovation and addition project has now arrived at the sealed-in stage where the contractors can begin finishing the walls and laying the floors that will form the engaging environment for the galleries and exhibits. All that just as they and Kearney are welcoming their new Director, Andrew Dunehoo, who began as Winter was upon us and now can emerge with the museum’s new building as it looks forward to its fall opening.
MONA is for Kearney something like the other bookend of the old Opera House, whose photo has welcomed visitors to this website since it opened. Both have served up many varieties of experiences in art and culture and both will always stand as icons of our historically rich heritage, in Nebraska and Kearney, a heritage of many arts, artists, venues, sponsors, and admirers. Sometimes the viewers, the audiences, are local, but sometimes they come from far off compass points. Steve Main, of Yanda’s Music and Pro Audio, says they stop to visit, already having heard of what goes on in Kearney or what has gone on before.
The sculpture garden in an art lover’s backyard or pieces of art in the owners’ homes, the exhibits soon to be up in the new MONA, the student art show historically hosted at MONA and, during their months down for construction, appearing at Kearney Public Library and on occasion at the Brickwalk Gallery, and indeed this website itself, all stem from the common joy in those works that show us to ourselves, tell us our story, and somehow lift us even beyond all that, lift us to what, in a term used by Mark Foradori, is “the first best thing.”
During Mark’s Senior College class on the visual arts, one particular work he was using to illustrate a modern movement in art was the artist’s invitation to enter a world of joy. Just as a way to welcome Spring, welcome growth, welcome renewed beauty, welcome progress for our many cultural partners, Kearney Creates offers here a few photos to celebrate art, those who cherish it, and the people who make it possible for so many to find joy in it. That’s the first best thing.
by Editor-in-Chief of Kearney Creates, Chuck Peek
