For artCentral’s collaborative exhibition SIGNS & WONDERS opening April 1, 2022, the artists are two. They are a couple that is us—my artist husband David and me—married five years. Already you may know our backstory about how, since our courting days, we have shared the inclination to “oou and ah” together at sights that catch our eyes and tweak our fancies on our Sunday morning outings—about how we collect images, capture moments and make sweet memories on our drives together—about how we then go home to make our art in our twinned studios.
                                                                                                                                                                                  
All the way back to our childhoods art-making has guided each of us through all the places and phases of our personal journeys until David found me in a magazine and we began to make our life in art together.
 
DAVID GREENWOOD-MATHÉ
Upon leaving his native Joplin, Missouri, David enrolled in the “Foreign Study League”. He earned art history credits in Rome, Florence and Paris: these were transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1973. He returned to Joplin and Missouri Southern State College for a Bachelor of Science in Education. David is a combat naval veteran, having served in the Middle East as well as the Mediterranean, Western Pacific and Arctic Ocean. While always pursuing artistic endeavors, he has been a semi-professional musician and singer-songwriter performing primarily on guitar or mandolin as well as a few other more exotic Instruments. David has appeared in music videos and three major independent films. While continuing his own freelance art career, for fifteen years David owned and operated the Upstart Crow Gallery in the Crossroads District of Kansas City, Missouri. Upon marrying me and moving to Carthage, David became a participating artist and the Gallery Prepitor (Art Handler) for artCentral.

ALICE LYNN GREENWOOD-MATHÉ
As a very young child I began to write and illustrate stories and to construct houses of sticks and stones. Art making was my passion then and has been ever since. With a BA, Cum Laude, in studio art from Hendrix College, while I raised my two children, I worked as a freelance graphic artist in Dallas, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Moving my young family to NYC, I attended the Art Students League and General Theological Seminary. For a small Manhattan fashion house I dressed Greenwich Village boutique windows and designed one-of-a-kind originals. After my nest emptied, I took to the wilderness of the Ozark Highlands. Four years of solitude beside the Little Buffalo River were spent rambling, photographing, gardening and deep diving into the world of spirit. I painted what I found as though writing my journal with a brush. Back in community, I exhibited and marketed my work full time until assuming the role of Executive Director-Curator here at artCentral. Now with David I still pour my passion into my own art making as I write her weekly Art Notes and nurture a vibrant creative space where other artists can flourish.      
 
Since David and I both have full time day jobs, David down the road at Ajinomoto, and me at artCentral, for now our personal art-making is limited to our Sunday afternoons. No surprise that the creating SIGNS & WONDERS has spanned four years of Sunday studio afternoons. David and I hope you will come see us and our eighty-eight creations!
 
For more information visit www.artcentral.org, email artcentral@artcentralcarthage.org or call (417) 358-4404.
 

                   SIGNS & WONDERS – The Backstory                                     ​

showing off their beauty; and naked winter old growth standing staunchly sensuous and unapologetic in bareness.

We love discovering a nursery of young black vultures lined up on a white fence railing with a raucous murder of ebony crows circling overhead; or a solo longhorn posing roadside and offering a repertoire of amusing expressions as though for a photo-op; or a pasture of horses dressed in masks and spats looking ready for a neighbor’s costume party.
                                           
With our comings and goings we are frequently entertained by the seemingly ordinary directional signs we encounter placed on poles to help and guide us in our travels. One in particular—the very noire arrow, pointed up with a wiggly tail flowing down over a reflective yellow backdrop—was the first road sign I decided to paint. “Wiggle Bottom” is a reminder of the squirming Aussie riding in my lap as we made our way up that curving, twisting tarmac trail.
 
All these signs and wonders seem to be love notes left by a grand heart filled with benevolence—reassuring us we live in a world of beauty and goodness, telling us to pause and slow down. We do. We slow down. We stop. As David gathers an appealing stick or stone or rusted scrap of bric-a-brac for his sculpture, I start snapping my camera’s shutter—collecting images, capturing moments, making sweet memories to put into my painted photo tableau.
 
We have loved collecting and making our SIGNS & WONDERS. We love sharing them with you. We hope they bring you joy and give you much to love, too!
 
You can see a preview of all 88 of our SIGNS & WONDERS creations at www.artcentralcarthage.org and in our photo albums on artCentral’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ArtcentralCarthage. Purchases will be available online or at Hyde House beginning at noon on Friday, April 1, 2022.

​SIGNS & WONDERS is coming soon to Hyde House! Mark your calendar and plan to attend the festive Opening Reception on Friday, April 1, 2022, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Filling the galleries downstairs and upstairs, too, this whimsical mixed media exhibition will be on view April 1 through May 21.
 
While excited for the new wafting in the air, we must bid “adieu” to VERDANT, the vibrant collection brought to artCentral by the talented members of the Joplin Regional Artists Coalition. Only one weekend remains with Gallery Hours from 12:00-5:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12. Give yourself a special spring pleasure. Visit VERDANT showcasing the lovely theme of “green”—“green” like artCentral’s green doors of hospitality, “green” like our Missouri lawns and surrounding countryside growing green with lush grass and rich vegetation.
 
Our gratitude goes out to the underwriters for VERDANT—The PALMS Massage and Day Spa and Cherry’s Custom Framing and Art Gallery—both well established, art-loving businesses on our historic square. Doug Osborn, a Carthage native and owner of THE PALMS, is a gifted and much sought after massage therapist, a talented photographer and a hard-working member of artCentral’s board of directors. Carthaginian Cherry Babcock, owner of Cherry’s, is a long-time supporter of artCentral and the innovative creator of a hometown gallery that rivals any of the best in any large urban setting. 
 
SPELLBOUND Boutique is the gracious underwriter for SIGNS & WONDERS. Sarah Manzer, SPELLBOUND’s owner, is an artist extraordinaire herself, whom I interviewed for Art Notes shortly after she opened her shop four years ago.
 
Sarah explained, “I just wanted a place to set up my sewing machine and make soulful custom clothes….When I was traveling with my Sarah Dunn Band, during breaks between performing I began making my stage outfits. I found great pleasure in designing and constructing these as a form of my own self-expression. That’s carried over into my work today. Through the shop I like to encourage people to make bold choices for their higher selves and to have lots of fun as they aspire to be more honest versions of their uniqueness. My arms are completely open—open to celebrate all people—all people of all body shapes and sizes—all people of all creeds.”
Spellbound Boutique echoes Sarah’s all-embracive gestalt that seeks to acquire and maintain meaning in our fast moving, chaotic world. With her Ozarkian spiritual orientation, she values the beliefs passed on through her ancestral peoples, particularly her mother and grandmother. They taught her the value of signs: for instance, if chimney smoke travels down to the ground then snow is on the way. Learning the power of magic and nature’s messengers and symbols, Sarah has chosen the owl as the Spellbound motif in her shop’s logo.
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Sarah sees owls all the time and everywhere as signposts pointing to transformation. She believes they appear to call her to pause and to consider, to stop and to evaluate, where she is in her life at the moments of their appearances. “In our screen-oriented times, we easily forget to see and feel the world we’re living in and walking through,” she observes. “Owls tell me to unplug, put down my screens and to step apart from the mainstream, so I can listen and hear what I need to know.”
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Thank you to Sarah Manzer for listening and hearing and believing in the SIGNS & WONDERS coming soon to Hyde House!

​Other than those group kiddie classes in the War Memorial public pool in Little Rock, Arkansas, (the ones that were structured to eliminate our fear of the water while giving us capabilities to keep ourselves afloat), I never had instruction in proper stroking with the intent to achieve maximum power and endurance. As a teenager and young adult I grew to love being in the water and had learned enough to feel comfortable and sufficiently capable to swim short distances to shore or the side of a boat when having lake fun on waterskis and slaloms.
 
Until I sat in the bleachers and watched young instructors teaching swimming basics to my two small children, I never thought about taking up lap swimming as a way to get exercise along with walking and jogging and practicing yoga. When I heard my son’s and daughter’s teachers repeat again and again, “slow and pretty,” “slow and pretty,” inspiration hit me. I thought, “Oh I can do this! Swimming doesn’t have to be about racing and competing and winning. Swimming can be another excuse to exercise outdoors!”
 
I added lap swimming to my repertoire of ways to stay fit year round. No matter where I have traveled and lived—Dallas, NYC’s Greenwich Village, upstate Vermont, the remote wilderness of the Ozark highlands and now Carthage—I have managed to find pools and rivers and lakes to do some lapping “slow and pretty” in every season.
 
As I swim toward my end time, the poetry of “slow and pretty” has become my moving forward mantra, in and out of the water, though in my mind I hear echoing the poetic admonishment of Welshman Dylan Thomas. Passionately beseeching his dying father, he wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
 
For all the days I have remaining before the dying of my light, may “slow and pretty” be my poetic burn, my poetic rave, my poetic rage as I swim more laps, love more life and make more art of this poetry we call living!
 
Throughout the Hyde House galleries the visual poetry of VERDANT continues on view through March 12, 2022, at 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage. Weekend Gallery Hours are Fridays and Saturdays, 12:00-5:00 p.m., with members of artCentral’s Board of Directors and JRAC serving as gallery docents to greet you.
 
For more information visit artCentral’s website or Facebook page, email artcentral@artcentralcarthage.org or call (417) 358-4404.