Treasuring the tension between what is and what could be
Meet some of the artists behind Hot Springs' thriving art scene.
A town needs many things to survive, but I don’t think it can’t thrive without artists like Kimbo Dryden.
Dryden is the second generation owner of Dryden Pottery, one of the oldest family-run pottery studios in the county. His dad, Jim, started the company in Kansas in the 1940s, just after finishing a stint in the military. Papa Dryden used his GI Bill to study ceramics, and after a decade of making pottery using Kansas clay, he moved his young family to Hot Springs, where there was more tourism traffic and equally suitable clay.
Kimbo was three years old at the time, and by the time he was in middle school, he was throwing clay just like his dad.
Kimbo’s son, Zack, is now the third generation potter at the helm of the business housed in Whittington Park, not far from the alligator farm that caught Babe Ruth’s famous home run.
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Even though Kimbo is mostly retired these days, he was at the studio the day we visited, ready to get his hands in some clay and talk about cashews.
Kimbo Dryden has talked about pottery for so long, at this point, he’s just as likely to talk about food. His new diet, specifically. No nightshades or potatoes. Definitely no cashews. Says he feels better than he has in a long time.
Dryden is a living treasure in Hot Spring, and this year, he’s *the* Arkansas Living Treasure, an honor bestowed each year to an Arkansasan whose contributions to the state stand out among all the others.
We didn’t spend more than 20 minutes at the studio, but I could have stayed for hours pulling stories out of this father-son duo. I grew up around a lot of creative, quirky hippie types, and Kimbo reminded me of many of my parents’ friends, filled with so many stories it would take a lifetime to hear them all.
I love artists like this who spend their lives weaving their art and their interests with their families and their labor, creating a never-ending adventure that just gets more interesting with each generation.
Hot Springs is certainly an art town, one of those places with an outsider vibe that attracts people who don’t fit in elsewhere, where people can make a living while not losing their creative edge.
For more than 30 years, the city’s artists, including the Drydens, have hosted a First Friday gallery walk to promote the local makers that now includes the new generation of folks, like the Riley brothers, who run the Riley Glass.
But some of the most memorable art in Hot Springs isn’t inside those studios.
In the past three years, the city has commissioned — or helped coordinate the production of — more than half a dozen murals on prominent buildings downtown.
Mary Zunick, cultural affairs manager with Visit Hot Springs, took us on a driving tour of these murals that reflect the city’s investment into public art. That’s a commendable step for any town, but I was disappointed to find out that hardly any of them were made by Arkansas artists.
Chris Arnold and Jeff Garrison of Dallas brought the city’s baseball history to life with “Playing Cards,” a piece that features five iconic baseball greats: Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige and Lefty Grove, all who had ties to Hot Springs in the late 19th and 20th centuries, when Hot Springs was the epicenter of spring ball.
An Italian artist named Pepe Gaka is the artist behind many of the pieces, including one honoring Garvan Woodland Gardens, a botanical garden on the other side of the lake, and another homage to “Black Broadway” on Malvern Street, where Hot Springs’ Black community thrived for many years.
But the most striking piece in Hot Springs is easily the mural featuring two Quapaw men on the side of a building across from Bathhouse Row. It’s another piece from Gaka, who based the images on paintings by the late Arkansas artist Charles Banks Wilson.
The Quapaw people were forced to relocate from Hot Springs to Louisiana and then Oklahoma during the early to mid 1800s. In Oklahoma, you’ll find many wonderful museums and tourist sights, many of them run by the tribes themselves, like the Chickasaw Cultural Center. But just across the state line, there’s painfully little acknowledgement of the native history of the land before settlers arrived. There’s no plaque next to this unmissable mural that explains why the Quapaw were forced to cede their land and leave the area to make way for the city that exists today.
I still can’t wrap my head around why an Italian artist would be hired to create the piece rather than a Quapaw, but that it exists is notable, even more so when you consider that it was the local rotary club that helped pay for it.
The same can be said of another mural less than a mile away — this one painted by Perrion Hurd, a Black artist from Little Rock — that features Harriet Tubman looking toward the city’s still-standing confederate monument. (The United Daughters of the Confederacy have no plans to take down the monument, which was built in 1934 in a plaza where lynchings are said to have taken place. The city could claim the property under eminent domain to remove the statue, but they have yet to do so.)
Art entertains and challenges its viewers.
Artists entertain and challenge the place where they live.
And that tension between what is and what could be is alive and well in Hot Springs.
We made it to Friday!
Thanks for reading along this Hot Springs series this week. I wanted to get all these stories out there before the Thanksgiving break. I’ll send out something short and sweet next week. My mom will be visiting, and we’re having Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house. So much to be thankful for. Including that tension between what is and what could be.
I hope all of you get some much needed rest, bonding, connection and/or alone time over the next week. I know I’ll need a little of all of it.
Until next time,
Addie
P.S. Don’t forget to check out Frank’s “Insecta” show at the Long Time at 2 p.m. on Saturday — his latest photo project will be hanging inside a sweet old house at the East Austin baseball field that’s home to the Texas Playboys. Come by hi! And I’ll be on the Long Center stage with Nigella Lawson on Nov. 22. Never a dull moment this time of year…
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Thanks so much for highlighting these amazing artists!