36 hours in Columbus … if the visual arts draw your attention
Columbus is a fast-improving art town. From fine art to folk art, whatever your tastes, visitors will find work on display – and some for sale. Professional curators are in charge of the work in one of the South’s best museums, and university galleries. Regional artists – painters, sculptors and photographers – work co-operatively on the display and sale of work in galleries. Public buildings, including libraries, corporate headquarters and universities, hang paintings by world-class artists. A dozen sculptures line Broadway. And, if your schedule permits a side trip, there’s exotic, visionary art just down the highway.
Here are 12 experiences if the visual arts draw your attention when you have 36 hours in Columbus.
#1 – Start at one of the most important museums in the South
The Columbus Museum is widely recognized as one of the most important in the Southeast. It is unique for its focus on art and history. The permanent collection on the main floor is a thoughtfully installed survey of American art, including paintings, sculpture and decorative arts by the country’s finest artists. On the same floor, the history gallery displays some 600 objects illuminating 10,000 years of regional history. All of this is housed in an 89,000 square foot, post-modern building on the estate of the late Columbus industrialist W. C. Bradley. The building, architecture critics Marilyn Laufer and Garry Pound wrote, “provides a dramatic stage set that intrigues and inspires the visitor.” West of the building are the Bradley Olmsted Gardens, designed in 1928 by Frederick Law Olmsted’s sons, “follows much of the elder Olmsted’s aesthetic,” notes former chief curator Kristen Miller Zohn.
Get maps and directions: Columbus Museum
#2 – The W.C. Bradley Company collection tell its story through art
The W.C. Bradley Company commissioned 33 artists in 1985 to interpret the company’s place in the region some 100 years after its founding. The resulting collection, hung in a restored cotton warehouse downtown, is valuable for the stories it tells about people, places and things that are fading from the company’s existence. The paintings focus on what was once the family farm, the now-silent forge and refractory that produced gas grills, the now-repurposed cotton warehouses, and nearby buildings in the downtown. “The true value of the collection,” writes CEO Marc Olivie, “lies in the large number of stories it tells through art.” Multiple works by Bo Bartlett, Henry Casselli, Chen Chi and Chuck Schmidtt.
Get maps and directions: W.C. Bradley Co. Museum
#3 – Four galleries exhibit visual arts in CSU’s burgeoning arts program
Columbus State University’s burgeoning art program exhibits work in four galleries. The Bo Bartlett Center, the Illges Gallery and the Bay Gallery are in the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, 113-139 10th Street. The Bartlett Center, newest among the three, exhibits large works by Columbus-native Bo Bartlett, one of the country’s most-important contemporary realist painters. The Illges typically presents six-eight exhibitions a year, both professional and student work, often accompanied by lectures and gallery talks. The Bay exhibits student work and hosts community outreach programs. The Fulcrum Gallery is a small, window-front space on Broadway, designed to acquaint downtown passersby with CSU’s arts exhibitions.
Get maps and directions: Corn Center for the Visual Arts
#4 – You need not drive to Alabama to glimpse the eccentric art of Butch Anthony
Folk artist Butch Anthony’s Museum of Wonder is a barn-like gallery on his 80-acre farm in Seale, Alabama, 17 miles southwest of Columbus. A taste of what you’d see in Seale is enclosed in a box-like sculpture in the median on Broadway at 10th Street in downtown Columbus. Anthony calls it the “Cabinet of Curiosity,” which is composed of stuff that Anthony has found or made: animal bones, vials of potions, a small wooden chest painted blue and filled with buttons, photographs on which Antony painted white skeletal lines. Anthony may be country eccentric, but he gets written up in the New York Times and shows his work in art galleries around the world. You’ll find other sculptor’s work along this five-block median, organized by ArtBeat. There is a weekly walk of the work on the first Friday of September through December.
Get maps and directions: Museum of Wonder, ArtBeat sculptures
#5 – Mike Howard’s paintings hang in Troy University’s Phenix City campus
Fourteen paintings by Mike Howard, most of them from his collection of “Paintings from Alabama,” hang in Troy University’s riverfront campus in Phenix City. Howard’s work has been described as “generous and spirited” and “painterly and imagistic.” The Alabama canvases portray scenes from his boyhood in Phenix City: the Red Barn, Chicken Comers, dairy cows and an IH Farmall tractor. Paintings from his “Flower” series, on the fourth floor, show how they were used by his celebrated set-designer wife, Mary Howard, in commissions for Italian Vogue. The Howards live in Hurtsboro, Alabama, and New York.
Get maps and directions: Troy University riverfront campus
#6 – Murals strengthen public, street-art scene
Four murals commissioned by a community-improvement project hang on walls in Columbus and Phenix City. Leading artists — Najee Dorsey, Butch Anthony and R.C. Hagans, Sally Bradley and Garry Pound — painted the panels, each one the artist’s interpretation of a poem also commissioned by the project, “My River Valley,” by Isaiah M. Harper. SPARK Art, a local organization committed to “making art available to everyone,” often highlights public and street art on its Facebook page.
Get maps and directions: Najee Dorsey mural, Butch Anthony and R.C. Hagans mural, Sally Bradley mural, Garry Pound mural
#7 – Folk artist Thomas Jefferson Flanagan’s paintings on view at a Columbus branch library
Six paintings by the late Thomas Jefferson Flanagan, one of the country’s most important folk artists, hang in the Mildred L. Terry Branch Library, 640 Veterans Parkway. Flanagan was born in 1896 in nearby Lumpkin, and was celebrated as an editor, teacher, minister, poet and artist.
Get maps and directions: Mildred L. Terry Branch Library
#8 – Rankin Arts Photography Center exhibits work of region’s leading photographers
Photographer Kenny Gray is the intelligence and drive behind Columbus State University’s Rankin Arts Photography Center. Exhibitions of work by regional photographers circulate monthly between two galleries. Other spaces are given over to a studio, classes and meeting space for a Gray-led study group – Photopia. Visit the galleries on the second floor of the Rankin Arts Center downtown, 1004 Broadway.
Get maps and directions: CSU’s Rankin Arts Photography Center
#9 – Burger King in re-purposed residence exhibits photojournalistic history of region
A photojournalistic history of Columbus, drawn from the 20th century archives of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, creates a strong “sense of place” on the walls of the Burger King at 2033 Wynnton Road. The 1930s-era English country-style building was repurposed in 1981 from the family home of Thomas B. Buck, Jr. of Buck Ice fame. More than 200 black and white photographs were selected, copied and printed from the Ledger’s archive by a consultant to Schuster Enterprises, which owns Burger Kings throughout the region.
Get maps and directions: Burger King
#10 – A gallery for regional artists who own and operate the space as a cooperative
The Gallery on 10th Street, exhibits work of regional artists who own and operate the storefront space as a cooperative. Members hang and sell their work – oil and watercolor paintings, photography, and sculpture in glass, wood and clay. Members take turns staffing the gallery, but you’re likeliest to meet water-colorist and office manager Rebecca L. Connor, who’s in the gallery twice a week. That’s good news because Connor is both knowledgeable and gracious. No pressure to buy. A surprising value are the notecards produced by the artists, some packets of seven cards and envelopes for as little as $7. Also plan to visit the Two Sisters Gallery in the Shops on 13th Street in Midtown.
Get maps and directions: Gallery on 10th Street, Two Sisters Gallery
#11 – Metal lunch boxes exhibited as art in nation’s best collection
One of the nation’s most-important collections of metal lunch boxes is in Columbus. The collector is Allen M. Woodall, Jr. – of an old and distinguished Columbus family – and his lunch boxes fill six tiers of shelves along four walls of his Lunch Box Museum at 3226 Hamilton Road. Woodall began collecting in the 1980s and the thousands he owns today are the “largest [collection] in the world,” he says. In 1999, Woodall co-authored The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes, published by Schiffer. Lunch boxes Woodall collected are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “His collection is national in scope, extremely deep, rich in quality and diversity,” Smithsonian curator David H. Shayt told the Ledger-Enquirer in 2001. A sales room adjacent to the museum offers lunch boxes priced from $15 to $520.
Get maps and directions: River Market Antiques
#12 – A “psychedelic Assisi” just down the highway near Buena Vista
Pasaquan is a world-recognized visionary art site near Buena Vista, Georgia, some 39 miles southeast of Columbus. Pasaquan is the creation of Eddie Owens Martin, who worked the site between the 1950s and his death in 1986. Not for young children nor the faint of heart, Pasaquan has been described as Martin’s “psychedelic Assisi in the Southern pines.” Preservationists hired by the Kohler Foundation are undertaking a two-year restoration. Once completed, the site will be owned and administered by Columbus State University’s Department of Art. Though officially closed, workers say they welcome visitors on weekdays “whenever the gate is open.” Pasaquan is not easy to find, but there are excellent driving directions here. Stop at The Dime in Buena Vista’s town square for Pasaquan-themed postcards and Tom Patterson’s book, St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan.
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