What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1439406
Editor's Note: We like to look back this time every year at the stories that we think best captured the state of the arts in Northwest Arkansas and the River Valley. This year, we're trying a new format. Each of us on the What's Up! staff has selected her three favorite stories from 2021. We'll reprint them as they ran previously, with an update on what's happened since then. This week, those three stories focus on an old friend from Rogers who is hoping to bring something completely different to the Northwest Arkansas Museum scene; an effort to bring hip hop to the regional music scene; and a fiddler who has made a name for Springdale on the country music scene. This story originally appeared May 30 in What's Up! BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette K endall Hart is an artist extraordinaire. His work is three-dimensional, beyond life-sized and so detailed, it looks like it could breathe, walk — and perhaps terrorize the countryside. It's also a good bet you've never seen anything like it in a serious museum outside Roswell, N.M., or Point Pleasant, W.Va. But John Burroughs wants to change all that. "I've always had more curiosity and imagination than I may really need," laughs Burroughs, who is well known to Northwest Arkansas as the former director of the Rogers Historical Museum. But he's also had the opportunity to do "almost every type of job in museums from collections, exhibit design and fabrication, and education to research and evaluation, fundraising, and administration." So when he and Hart, a lifelong artist, met while both were working on a museum expansion project, it was a match made in … Valhalla? Camelot? Area 51? It wasn't long before Hart had introduced Burroughs to his "Gardens of Myth" traveling companions — life- size sculptures of fantastic beasts — and the idea for a permanent museum was hatched. "I would love to relate to your readers how the idea came to me in a dream about marble pedestals and bronze-cast sculpture depicting the legends of the world's imagination," Hart begins, "but it really came to me on the winds of a Kansas City tornado that chased me home after installing my traveling show for the first time in a botanical garden in 2017. The idea resurfaced a year later in Nashville rush hour traffic during the show's second season. "The rigors of travel inspired the idea of a forever home for my art and for the world's myths. I wanted my own myth museum!" After a lot of market research, the partners know one thing: They want to build the World Myth Museum in one of two places — in metropolitan St. Louis or in Northwest Arkansas. Both Burroughs and Hart had very traditional Mid-American childhoods in rural Illinois. For Burroughs, escape from farm life was anything related to either the American West or World War II — "most people who know me know I'm a huge 'Gunsmoke' fan" — but along the way he discovered that "our character as Americans many times comes from legends and the enjoyment we get from them," not necessarily reality. "Storytelling was an important part of my family history, so I have an appreciation for sharing experiences. I have always been interested in history, artifacts and museums, so entering the museum field was a natural move for me," Burroughs says. "I like the process of learning, designing exhibits, inspiring people to want to know more, and connecting with artifacts to create a link between different times or cultures." "My journey to myth maker began as a child in the 1980s," Hart picks up his side of the story. "Wanting to re-create my favorite characters, I experimented with art to the point of playing Frankenstein with my dinosaur figures to make my own toys. Cut the plates off a Stegosaurus, glue them on the back of my T-rex, hide the damage from Mom, and I had my own custom Godzilla toy! The ability to bring whatever I wanted into our world was the magic art held for me." Career choices in his hometown were pretty much limited to farmer, truck driver or coal miner, Hart says, but his trajectory beyond that realm was cemented when a teacher introduced him to the artwork of Frank Frazetta. "Inspired by pulp fantasy and surrealism, but also by the exaggerated realism of Norman Rockwell, I knew it was a career in art for me," he says. DECEMBER 26, 2021-JANUARY 1, 2022 WHAT'S UP! 5 YEAR IN REVIEW See Myth Museum Page 37 The Myth-ing Link Museum the first to merge fantasy, fact and folklore Whether he's called Sasquatch, Yeti, Orang Pendek or Yowie, a hairy manlike beast who walks on two feet — and leaves giant footprints — is found in folklore around the world. This one will soon be a permanent resident of the World Myth Museum, which its creators hope will be based in Northwest Arkansas. John Burroughs (left) was previously the director of the Rogers Historical Museum and has experience in every kind of museum job from "collections, exhibit design and fabrication and education to research and evaluation, fundraising, and administration." Kendall Hart is an artist inspired by "pulp fantasy and surrealism, but also by the exaggerated realism of Norman Rockwell." (Courtesy Photos/World Myth Museum)