When Chris Frederick came to MU, she was told the college credit she'd earned in Germany couldn... Starving for sales...
When Chris Frederick came to MU, she was told the college credit she'd earned in Germany couldn't go toward the nursing degree she planned to pursue. So she decided to take an art class or two. Since receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996, Frederick has established herself as one of Columbia's most accomplished artists. Her watercolor paintings are regularly on display in local galleries and art venues, and the fluid landscapes she is known for are part of private collections in the United States and in Europe.
But, Frederick has to change gears a bit when she's painting for the masses in Columbia. Enter Frieda, the artist's beloved dachshund. Compared to, say, her watercolor of Columbia's Sacred Heart Church, which captures the mid-morning light streaming through the stained glass with incredible warmth, Frederick's miniature portraits of Frieda seem to leap off the proverbial shelf.
Jim Downey, who writes an art column for the Columbia Daily Tribune, says he has heard this complaint countless times. Downey and his partners lost several hundred thousand dollars before they were forced to close their gallery, Legacy Art & Bookworks, in May 2004. Downey says he could never sell enough art for the business to remain viable.
The same frustrations visited upon Downey present a classic conundrum for Columbia artists, who rely on galleries to both display their work and attract serious buyers. Jane Gideon, who used to operate The Dauphine gallery before its closure, says gallery owners need to be financially prepared for lots of browsers, but few buyers. “In order to have a gallery and make it financially, your pockets have to be so deep that it doesn't matter if you only sell one painting,” Gideon says.
Columbia can also brag about its artists. Frederick, Joel Sager, Paul Jackson, David Spear, Susan Glasgow Taylor and others have all made their mark across the state and beyond. Yet, in the town they call home, they struggle for the kind of recognition that matters most — sales.
Although the committee's standing goal, like all of the bureau's programs, is to find new ways to bring revenue into the city, it will also look to help Columbia's artist community by positioning the city as a destination for collectors from around the country. Steiner says attracting more out-of-town buyers of art to Columbia could change how residents think about their artists.
Eureka Springs is a tiny town nestled in the Ozarks at the end of a winding Arkansas mountain road. Couples and newlyweds flock there to enjoy the town's romantic ambience, taking in the scenery and staying in one of the many quaint bed and breakfasts. They also seem to buy a lot of art, which isn't surprising since Eureka Springs has some 19 art galleries.
The town was actually founded about 60 years ago by two Missouri natives, Lewis and Elsie Frund, who were avid art enthusiasts. Though its population is just a little more than 2,200, the city's budget provides more than $1 million a year to advertise and promote the town's artists and galleries. The town is routinely recognized by American Style, a magazine for collectors of fine art and crafts, as one of the nation's top arts destinations. Its reputation attracts not only buyers, but the work of artists all over the country, including Columbia's Mark Nichols, who has displayed his multi-media pieces at Eureka Springs' Quicksilver Gallery.
Lynne Berry, executive director of Eureka Springs' Advertising and Promotions Commission, says the town would be hard-pressed to maintain the art market without a special sales tax, passed by voters in 1972, levied at restaurants, hotels, gift shops and other attractions. The tax not only ensures that the arts and artists receive timely promotion; it also gives everyone in Eureka Springs a stake in the city's future.
The city of Columbia's Office of Cultural Affairs was created 14 years ago to help the city's artists and cultural organizations plan and develop programs that increase public awareness of the city's creative side. The office maintains an artists registry, publishes a newsletter, offers technical support to nonprofit arts groups and organizes the weeklong Festival of the Arts.
But it provides just $76,000 in funding support to artists and cultural groups, a relatively meager sum that comes from the city's general fund. That means funding for the arts in Columbia competes with more pressing issues of broader interest, such as sidewalks, recycling and street cleaning.
Marie Nau Hunter, manager of cultural affairs for the city, says that funding of any public need reflects the city's priorities as determined by its elected officials. She does point out that Columbia is second only to St. Louis among the state's largest cities in public funding for the arts. Kansas City, Independence and Lee's Summit, for example, don't commit any taxpayer funding to help support and promote local arts agencies, relying solely on private sources of revenue.
The city has made a commitment to public art through its Percent for Art program, which sets aside 1 percent of capital improvement projects that exceed $1 million for site-specific artwork. But even that program has come in for some criticism, from the type of work being commissioned — public input about a recent project, “Look Out Point,” at Stephens Lake Park was overwhelmingly negative — to the fact that the largest commissions are open to out-of-town artists. Downey wrote about the issue, saying he wished that the Standing Committee on Public Art, which makes the final decision on the Percent for Art commission had limited the competition to Columbia's artists.
Daniel Waltman, of American Style magazine, which rates the top 25 arts cities in America each year, says that a good arts destination successfully links its creative talent and resources to its overall identity. Places like Buffalo, Milwaukee and Albuquerque weren't known as cities with vibrant artistic communities – until they made it central to the re-birth of their central business districts.
Columbia's downtown has changed over the years, but because its economic base – a major university and two colleges – has never faltered, it has never fallen hard times and therefore never needed a wholesale image makeover that could revolve around attracting and promoting art. This has had an impact on gallery owners, who have either failed or found other ways to keep the doors open. Galleries like Poppy and Bluestem, for example, have developed a niche selling fine crafts, such as jewelry, glassware, greeting cards and wood carvings, alongside paintings and sculpture.
Indeed, the people who do commit themselves to Columbia's fine artists tend to see it as a form of civic duty. A La Campagne on Broadway has an entire upper floor dedicated to showing the work of local artists, for instance, despite the fact that the extra space cuts into the profit margin of its main business, antique and furniture sales. Former Poppy co-owner Jennifer Perlow, who recently opened PS Gallery on Broadway, pledged to maintain an inventory that includes 50 percent local art, even though she knows from experience that it's harder to move.
And it would help if they bought here, in Columbia. Chris Fredericks and others say that Columbia residents who do buy art – even art by Columbia artists – often buy it elsewhere.
One of them is painter Frank Stack, who came to Columbia in 1963 to teach art at the University of Missouri and has used that job to supplement whatever he earns from his paintings. Stack says that he is never able to predict what a buyer is going to like. Not that he would want to. “It always shows in the result if you think about selling it when you paint it,” he says.
Painter Joel Sager says that traditional tastes tend to dominate the local buyers' market. In fact, Sager says he has seen a marked effect on sales since he began working with a new theme: war. His previous work, which features stark and stormy rural landscapes, sold pretty well, he says. However, his new canvases, a series entitled “Destruction of State,” resemble aerial photographs taken from the perspective of a ball-turret gunner or satellite imaging technology and have not been as accepted by buyers. Ostensibly landscapes themselves, darkened by the same sense of foreboding and imminent destruction as his stormscapes, they nonethless represent a departure from the more formal style that marked his earlier work.
Allan and Betty Burdick, Columbia residents who have been buying art for decades, have amassed a collection that includes both local and non-local artists as well as traditional and avant-garde pieces. Right around the corner from a Stack watercolor, depicting the creek that rushes past the Burdick's home, one finds an abstract French wood-cut dating from the 1950's. In the mezzanine, a stretched, three-dimensional canvas work titled “The Watchers” makes a silent commentary on the disentegration of the family unit caused by the advent of television. It hangs directly below another formal landscape.
Steiner's efforts to bring the sensibilities of local artists and buyers together through the Convention and Visitors Bureau evolved through conversations she had with Patrick Howe, a Seattle gallery owner she came across while seeking out ideas for arts tourism online.
Howe's background is in advertising and marketing, which he is using to overcome what he calls the elite gallery system. Howe says too many people think art is for the wealthy and the educated. He says this is because, for a very long time, the cycle of creating and selling a piece of art was limited to a single, elite class.
The modern art gallery system still largely revolves on the old belief that the middle-class are not a viable market because their pocketbooks are too small. That's no longer true.
MU art history professor Kristin Schwain says that, as it seeks its identity as an arts destination, Columbia should consider the culture of the Midwest. The art world is just like any other economic sector, Schwain says; to be successful, the producer must create his niche. Just as Santa Fe offers western style and Eureka Springs offers romance, Columbia could present itself as the foremost destination for traditional arts and crafts.
David Spears' studio is on the backside of Willie's Pub and Pool on Broadway, down a narrow alley. It shares a wall with the Regency Premier hotel's pool and is most easily reached by driving through the nearby beauty salon's parking lot until you see the tiny red sign above a knob-less door. Spear has to share the windowless space with other artists, but at least he's not working out of his home like many Columbia artists must do.
Like artists everywhere, Columbia's painters, sculptor, musicians and performers teach, wait tables, tend bar or sell services related to their art. Spear was recently able to give up a six-year bartending gig at Addison's, whose walls still display his work. He survives largely on commission work from firms outside of Columbia. Recreating the history of H&R Block through paintings pays the bills, he says, but it doesn't require as much creativity as he'd like and it doesn't leave much time to focus on his own inspirations.
“If I sell one painting that I work on in my own time with my own idea in mind, that's a bonus,” Spear says. There's a sketch in his studio that was spawned by his reflections of Columbia as a transient town, but he grimaces a little when he talks about ever getting it finished.
Even though Columbia's economy has remained stable and it has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state, Spear says he has seen many artists give up on the city to find a better audience for their work.
“I see a ton of really good artists leave this town and go other places where things are happening,” he says, naming Kansas City, Los Angeles and New York as the top destinations for relocating artists.
While the Convention and Visitor's Bureau prepares to commit more public resources to bettering the art environment in Columbia, several private initiatives are underway toward rthe same end. A group of old warehouse, just east of the Wabash bus station, are being renovated into Orr Street Studios by developer Mark Timberlake. The project will feature an industrial theme and a combination of studio space, meeting places and a community exhibition area. Though still under construction, most of the planned sixteen 8,000-square-foot studios have been leased by local artists. Teeter, who is a sculptor himself, says rents will be priced affordably, with free utilities, as a way to encourage artists to put a little more time into making art.
Brian Pape, a developer and chairman of Columbia's Historic Preservation Committee, has made a similar commitment with his planned reconstruction of the Diggs meat packing plant, the roof of which caved in earlier this year. He's also included plans for studio space and an exhibition area along with apartments and a café.
This combination of public and private enterprise could make Columbia – always an attractive place for artists – a more attractive place for buyers and collectors, as well. Spear says he is looking forward to the day when “art” will be more than a word attached to the city's image of itself and actually become an integral part of its culture and character.
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