Natural visionary

As much as I am taken by art, I have to admit it is the artists themselves who most captivate me.
Generally, I find, their quirky and passionate nature far more demonstrative than their labor. Although I do not particularly like the weird themes of either Salvador Dali or Frida Kahlo, how can one not be enthralled with their multihued lives. Artists, if not a bit different, are nothing.
My latest, favorite artist is amazingly colorful and complicated, although not to the extent of her wild artistic vision perhaps. Holly Hughes, as intricate as her mind is, could never be confused as an exact reflection of her complicated, three-dimensional art of fabric, paint and human artifact.
No, Holly is refreshing in her clear, almost simplistic understanding of the world. In my view, she speaks and acts with an honesty and innocence of a child. Few of us are willing to take that chance it seems.
But since the world can sometimes be a jumble of good and bad, her view of it through her art is just that – an extremely complicated mosaic with many sidebars within the main theme.
I had the opportunity to meet Holly Hughes recently as she was setting up a new exhibit at the Anita B. Gorman Discovery Center near the Country Club Plaza. The three-paneled work, which will be on display this summer, is much like her art throughout the rest of the world with its heavy accent on nature – the good, bad and the ugly.
“The emphasis is the earth,” she said without hesitation. “The emphasis is having a creative way to look at the world around you, instead of just walking past everything and living inside of yourself.
“My art is about that; the earth and how to make each moment … each breath … each thing that you touch a part of your world.”
Ironically, one of Holly’s best known works in the Kansas City is, literally, a globe of the earth. The large and whimsical orb is 12 feet in diameter and sits grandly in the lobby of EarthWorks, a children’s nature workshop in the Hunt Midwest caves north of the river.
Much like the work on display at the Discovery Center, it portrays mostly the good about our environment and natural world.
“That was a nine-month baby,” she describes of the EarthWorks globe with all its figures of animals, oceans and landmasses. “But you know what? I didn’t really have that much to do with it. It was me and 2,000 kids and adults working on that piece. I was just the vessel and all the energy just flowed through me.
“But the EarthWorks globe was a great project because it involved so many people and so many different kinds of materials. It is a wonderful educational tool because, like the pieces at the Discovery Center, you can take a closer look at it and find all the different kinds of animals and learn about their environment. For instance, the forests are made of plastic forks.”
There is just no telling what you might find in a Holly Hughes’ work, also, literally, spread across the globe – many as commissioned pieces.
In the New Mexico statehouse in Santa Fe, one of the art capitals of the world, visitors are often stopped in their tracks with her large Buffalo head mount that is made from myriad materials, including brushes and newspaper headlines describing the Buffalo Bills trips to the Super Bowl. Up close, it truly is a fascination of objects and things. Further back, it looks just like a real Buffalo head.
Many of the objects of her earthy dioramas are pillow-like renditions of fish, forest and wildlife that she’s sewn. She took to sewing in her native, urban Kansas City before she could talk.
“This art comes from every atom of my being. It comes from the way I love the world around me. It comes from the way I see things. It comes from what other people throw away. I’ll see something and say, ‘WHOA! THAT LOOKS LIKE AN EYE.’
“It started when I was in kindergarten. I would walk to school through Gilliam Park and I would pick up a little broken this or a little broken that. And I loved to sew. I learned to sew before I learned how to talk. It began when I would mess with my shoe laces … so you see this thread thing has been going on a long time for me.”
But in addition to a finely sewn eaglet, you might also find a rather disgusting plastic prescription bottle or rusty piece of discarded metal. It’s all part of the message of being a good shepherd of the earth.
“For the most part the people who know me and my art will tell me, ‘Holly, I’ve got this bag of stuff I don’t know what to do with. Would you take it?’ I have a very difficult time in saying no.”
Holly is passionate about all the subject matter that is crammed into each work, even the nuisance objects that one often finds after a second or third look. Some things within the piece excite her and she will explode in enthusiasm when pointing them out to visitors.
“This piece, I think, is a great example,” she exclaims, pointing to a paddlefish composite. “The paddlefish is 50 million years older than the dinosaurs. And think about it, this fish is living in the Missouri River Basin … and the Yangtze River in China. Those are the only two places in the world. The fact that we still have water that this fish can live in is great and wonderful.”
Although a dedicated conservationist, Holly Hughes is as much a dedicated artist. The great majority of her art has an environmental bent, but not all.
My favorite is prominently displayed in the Blue Room in Kansas City’s historical Jazz District. It was commissioned and completed in 1990 and is a gift from Morton and Estelle Sosland. It is a vibrant interpretation of Billie Holiday singing “God Bless the Child who has His Own.”
Just below the work is the artist’s statement: “This is a tribute to African American Women that have given us soul filled music. … It recycles many things that would otherwise be thrown away.”
God Bless the Artist who has Her Own.