​Your donation can help in many ways:

$10 Every art journey begins with an art supporter!
$20 Brushes and paint and paper, oh my! Your gift provides for artCamp supplies!
$35 Your gift provides for one scholarship class for one artCamper.
$40 Your gift allows artCentral to train interns to take first steps towards careers in art education and leadership.
$50 Your gift helps with snacks for our always hungry artCampers!
$70 Your gift supplies an artCamp classroom
$100 Your gift supports a community workshop.
$200 Your gift provides for artCamp teacher compensation.
$200 Your gift supports artCentral’s satellite exhibitions.
$250 Mona Lisa smiles at your generosity!
$500 For the love of art and artists. Your gift supports artCentral in our outreach to artists and our community through exhibitions, awards and publicity.

Be sure to visit artCentral soon to see the amazing art of Connie Miller’s “Conversations in Color” on exhibit during weekend gallery hours now through May 19th. The walls of Hyde House at 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage are virtually vibrating with energy and with colors singing in spring. The pigments in this new collection are strong, bold and brilliant! They are bright, exciting and uplifting! They are happy, fun and inspiring!

While you’re at Hyde House sign up for Connie Miller’s Draw-and-Paint Studio Workshop. Plan to spend two delightful hours on Saturday, May 11, 2019, 2:00-4:00 p.m., learning from an experienced, expert practitioner. For Connie’s Draw-and-Paint Studio Workshop the fee is $20 paid in advance and includes all supplies and the promise you’ll be taking home lots of valuable instruction plus your own colorfully painted gourd birdhouse.

“Give 4ART!” on Give Carthage Day! “Give Where You Live” and make a difference! Visit artCentral and experience the benefits your generosity creates for our entire community!

decorations under magnificent Japanese tulip trees blessedly spared from late frosts. As dogwood blossoms are unfolding, many-hued redbuds and lilacs growing fragrant have joined the flowering trees of pear and crabapple and weeping cherry.

Mother Nature knows best! With her presentation of each new gift in turn, she gives us time to savor before we bid adieu.

At artCentral we are bidding adieu to three cherished members of our board of directors who have given tremendously of their gifts and are now departing for their next adventures in their work and philanthropic endeavors. To Jane Van Den Berg and Gail White and Lee Pound we bid our fond good-byes knowing we will see them again in future seasons.

Arriving to take their turns each of our three new board members brings unique and splendid gifts to share.
Madelynn Capps, a Carthage native known to many as “Maddie”, will graduate from Crowder College in May and begin studies at Pittsburg State University this fall. Double majoring in English education and photography, she aspires to be an English teacher, photography teacher and assistant tennis coach. While attending Carthage High School Maddie participated in 4-H and was the yearbook’s photographer in her junior and senior years. She’s been an intern/docent and artCentral member for four years. In April 2016, Maddie with Katie Watson debuted as a photographer-artist duet for artCentral’s first “Emerging Artists” exhibition. While studying and working part-time selling boots at the Justin Boots outlet store in Joplin, Maddie is growing her own small photography hobby-business one snap at a time.

Wendi Douglas, a Tulsa native, pursued an English degree at MSSU with a focus on technical writing. She has worked for the American Cancer Society, Girl Scouts and United Way in positions focused on public relations, recruitment and fund raising. Wendi served nearly ten years as the Executive Director of the Carthage Convention and Visitors Bureau. Married to Brad and living in Joplin with two daughters, Wendi has been honored as an Influential Woman by the Joplin Tri-State Business Journal and has served on the board of the Young Professionals Network of Joplin, The Missouri Travel Council and Missouri Association of CVB’s. She’s a founding member of Vision Carthage and Carthage Art Walk. She currently serves on the boards of the Joplin Sports Authority and the Carthage Council on the Arts where she volunteers for the newly created Art.A.Fair committee. Wendi’s also a member of the Public Relations Society of America.
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Kerry Sturgis, a longtime photographer, and his wife Bev, artCentral’s Membership Coordinator, have been artCentral members for ten years. They are master Gardeners and have served as Literacy Council mentors in the English as a Second Language program. A native of Florida's Tampa Bay area, Kerry with Oklahoma native Bev moved to Carthage in 2008 after seventeen years in Albuquerque. There they participated in the vibrant art scene of Santa Fe. Kerry worked as a journalist during his Navy years and today uses those learned skills in his contracted technical writing. His main professional focus has been on industrial health and safety. He is a RN registered in Missouri. He serves on the more than 5K member Missouri Stream Team composed of volunteers who monitor stream health for the Missouri Department of Conservation. He monitors our own Center Creek here in Carthage. Oh, yes! and Kerry knows his way around a guitar and has an amazing repertoire of vocal tunes. He and my husband David are terrific jam partners!

Please join me in welcoming these three amazingly-gifted, best-of-spring gifts who are enthusiastically taking their turns on artCentral’s board of directors.

our worldly belongings through the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River and right on into Midtown Manhattan with my two children hooraying and our two cats meowing—all of us ready to step out onto terra firma and a brand new life. We did step out and stepped up to accelerated expansion that continues to unfold.
 
We’re all still grooving on our evolutions begun on that remarkable day that sent my son to set up his family and outdoor adventuring and techno successes in the great northwest as my daughter does her Jersey-to-city work compute and raises our granddaughters with her husband while David and I create our art-centric shared experiences anchoring artCentral here in mid-America. Living life with our expanded worldviews across the continent is good for all of us, really good!
 
Going east or west to touch coasts and share time with those we love is a huge part of our life’s goodness. Taking a quick week to be in New Jersey to meet and hold our new grandgirl, Xandie, and play with her big sis, Sophie, is pure bliss. A day doing art in the city is a fabulous bonus, especially when the day includes taking in the current MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibition “Joan Miró: Birth of the World”, the subject of The New Yorker’s art critic review by Peter Schjeldahl whom I first found soon after deboarding that UHaul truck.
 
Since our first introductions, I have always loved Schjeldahl’s writing in the same way I have always loved the art of Miró. Both are masters of their crafts they create with inventive intelligence informed with childlike delight and wonder. Schjeldahl uses a lot of five-dollar words, meaning I have to consult Siri when I need a good definition, but he doesn’t use those to be show-off-y but rather because the art he describes begs for more than plain and regular descriptors. As though just for fun Schjeldahl throws in fancy words from his vast personal lexicon. Apparently he has always done and continues to do what feels most natural.
 
In a similar way I feel compelled by my own “can-do” driving instincts. In this regard I like to claim a commonality of background with both Schjeldahl and Miró. We all three, guided by our aversions to expected conventions, have more or less stumbled into our life callings by running away from the expected into the greater unknown. (I just couldn’t bring myself to get a “safe” degree for a respectable profession, because I always only wanted to be an ARTIST!, never dreaming I would end up as the executive director-curator of a non-profit arts organization I absolutely adore!)
 
I like Schjeldahl for being the small-town Minnesota boy who, ravenous for sophistication and knowledge, dropped out of his close-to-home-college, worked his way east as a newspaper reporter and made his contributions to The Village Voice, Art in America, The New York Sunday Times, Vanity Fair and now The New Yorker and makes time to write books, his most recent being “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker”.
 
Just as I admire Schjeldahl for his set-your-compass-on-your-true-north gumption, I’m impressed by Miró, the international Catalan. Miró, born in Barcelona in 1893, was by his goldsmith/watchmaker father shamed away from a career in art and driven to be a clerk. Miro’s response after two years was to have a complete nervous breakdown then finally enroll in a local art school. 

As Schjeldahl tells us, Miró “visited Paris in 1920 and…soon bedazzled the art scene with works like the energetically fragmented, blazingly colored ‘The Farm” (1921-22), which was bought by Ernest Hemingway. Miro joined the Surrealist group in 1924.” (The Farm is an oil painting made between the summer of 1921 in Mont-roig del Camp and winter 1922 in Paris—a kind of inventory of the masia [Catalan: a type of rural construction] owned by Miró's family since 1911 in the town of Mont-roig del Camp.)
 
Described by Schjeldahl, today Miró “is known best for his trademark lexicon of asterisk and scribble, petal and curlicue.” Alexander Calder’s mobiles took “Miró’s influence to literal heights, with variations on the Catalan’s repertoire of catchy, nature-allusive forms suspended in air.”
 
The Joan Miró works David and I stand before, relish and admire on our afternoon at MOMA, are summed up perfectly by wordsmith Schjeldahl: Miro is “given to timeless, simple pleasures of recalled childhood and artisanal tinkering. Miró is fun. He earns and will keep his place in our heart, rather exactly like Calder, with abounding charm.”
 
There’s no denying, I am thoroughly charmed by my charming husband’s exquisite artistic tastes that embrace the charming writers and artists I adore!

​​During a spring much like the one we’re enjoying, I first discovered peanut soup at a tiny rustic café beside the ribbon of a roadway winding and bending over the spine of peaks running through North Carolina’s Blueridge Mountains. I fell in love with that soup and developed a great appreciation for George Washington Carver, the “Peanut Man” of Tuskegee University, who found hundreds of uses for peanuts as he promoted them as a way to enrich cotton-depleted soils of the South and offer farmers growing alternatives.

Perfect for these cool transitional days into spring, Carver’s soup  is simple to make with 1 qt. milk, 2 tbs. butter, 2 tbs. flour and 1 c. peanuts. Cook the peanuts until soft; remove the skins, mash or grind until very fine; let the milk come to a boil; add the peanuts; cook 20 minutes. Blend the flour into a smooth paste with milk.  Add the butter to the peanuts and milk, stir in the flour paste, season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot. Bon appétit!
 
After weeks of excited anticipation, spring is again delighting us with beauty around every bend. This coming weekend, just west of Diamond, Missouri, there are many bends waiting to delight, enchant and educate us at George Washington Carver National Monument Park the birthplace and childhood home of George Washington Carver, scientist, educator, artist and humanitarian.
 
In celebration of National Park Week all are invited to the annual “Art in the Park/Earth Day” on Saturday, April 20, 2019, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The day is a free event showcasing the artwork of George Washington Carver and an opportunity to celebrate Earth Day early.
 
Inspired by the natural environment of his childhood home, throughout his lifetime George Washington Carver gained a sense of serenity and personal rejuvenation from nature and from his artistic work. Writing for a newspaper post, Georgia B. Skaggs tells us as a boy Carver made “his own paints from bark, roots and wild berries. Having no canvas, he used boards, tin cans, glass and flat rocks. His skill as a painter won him acclaim at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition; in 1916 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England; and was honored with a request for a still life from the famed Luxembourg Gallery in Paris. His greatest recognition as an artist came in 1941, when the Carver Art Gallery in the George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee was opened to the public.”
 
My artist husband David and I take our puppies for a weekly photo-taking walk-about at George Washington Carver National Monument Park every Sunday before our studio afternoons. The puppies know the trail by heart: the meandering, scented paths; the sweet running creek adorned with lush green clusters of watercress; the stacked stone walls with their lovely textured tops; the massive boulder to be scaled for a visit with the beautiful bronze of George Washington Carver as a boy seated in thought; the leaf-carpeted path around the contemplative pond bedecked with reflections of the sky and tree-lined banks; the old Carver cabin with welcoming open doors, rockers for resting and warm wood floors for stretching out in the sun streaming in through paned windows; and the silent village of the family burial grounds just beyond the black walnut trees.
 
For “Art in the Park/Earth Day” all artists are encouraged to enjoy a day of plein air painting along the trails, to display their work and to give workshops for the public. Visitors are encouraged to participate. A “budding artists” area will feature natural dyes, painting color swatches and other children’s art activities.
 
At 11:00 a.m., a park ranger will share the program “Expressions of the Soul”, featuring Carver’s artistic creations including some of his original artwork on display in the museum.
 
At 1:00 p.m., featured artist/guest speaker Sarah Serio, a native of Neosho, Missouri, will give an artist talk entitled “Welcome to the Game: Human Trafficking in America.” Serio is a nationally known, awareness-raising printmaker who creates in traditional methods of hand-carved, hand-inked and hand-pulled images.
 
In the spirit of awareness raising, George Washington Carver National Monument Park participates in environmental innovation and implementation of earth friendly practices. The walking path leading toward the  site of the Carver cabin is made of re-purposed tires. Down by the creek and up to the bronze of Carver as a boy, the boardwalks are constructed of thousands of up-cycled milk jugs. The Earth Day celebration will include a special film viewing and crafts from recycled materials throughout the day.
 
Celebrate “Art in the Park/Earth Day”. Wander about, look and see. Enjoy true peacefulness as you sit a spell by the contemplative pond. You’ll be inspired. You’ll be uplifted by art and by the natural beauty of the childhood home of George Washington Carver.  Pausing here you’ll be happy to call our Earth our home!
 
For information contact park ranger Curtis Gregory at curtis_gregory@nps.gov or (417) 325-4151.