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Banner walk puts art on display
Published 9/19/2008 in News : Area coverage
By STEPHANIE FARLEY
sfarley@gctelegram.com
You can't blame people for not being into art when there's nothing to see, according to local artist Armando Minjarez.
But on Thursday, Minjarez and 12 other area artists were giving strollers and drivers along Main Street something to look up for and at. The night marked the first annual Banner Art Walk, which is a project created through the partnership of Garden City Downtown Vision and the Southwest Kansas Arts and Humanities Council. The event included 12 banners -- with a total of 24 different pieces of art -- displayed along Main Street, while some downtown retailers, such as The Corner on Main, The ArtsCenter on Main and Patrick Dugan's coffee shop, kept their doors open later.
The banners are decorated by 13 area artists and will remain on display along Main Street until Nov. 17, when they'll be taken down and displayed in the Downtown Vision office, 413 N. Main St., before being sold through silent auction Nov. 29 after the Stevens Park Tree Lighting Ceremony. A minimum bid of $75 is required for each piece, with some of the proceeds going to purchase canvas for next year's event. Proceeds beyond the minimum bid will be split between the artist and Downtown Vision.
According to Downtown Vision, the banner project developed out of a desire by the Downtown Vision Design Committee to incorporate Garden City's "thriving art community" with the need for new banners along Main. The artists were selected and contacted through the help of the Southwest Arts and Humanities Council. The banners were purchased with funds through the Western Kansas Community Foundation. Altogether, Downtown Vision Executive Director Beverly Schmitz Glass estimates, the project cost a total of about $2,000.
The event's purpose, Glass said, is three-fold: providing a different medium for local artists; bringing people downtown; and getting people to look up, with them hopefully noticing the art, as well as the architectural detail in downtown's second story.
Glass said those with Downtown Vision always are talking about making downtown "pedestrian friendly," and Thursday allowed peopled to walk up and down the street, looking at art and getting a feel for what downtown "could be." Some of downtown's retailers also remained open, and Glass said that also gives them a chance "to see what their world would look like after 5 p.m."
For Sheryl Cockrum, the day had been stressful, so she thought, "why not?" of coming downtown to enjoy the weather and art. It's an opportunity to see something different, she said, adding she doesn't feel the community partakes sometimes as much as it should in various events and that art can tend to be underappreciated at times.
But if there's nothing to see, Minjarez said, then it's hard to have an appreciation of art. But Thursday's event was another venue, he said, for artists to show off their work.
Minjarez moved to the area from Mexico when he was 15. The move was a shock for Minjarez, who came from a metropolitan city to a rural area. According to Minjarez, "the language barrier, the food, music, the climate... it all seemed to play against the odds of a fruitful, creative future of an artist in the making."
He was angry for awhile about the move, he said. But then, he started commuting from Ulysses to Garden City for work and school and noticed the vast sky and fields and the simple beauty of the Kansas landscape.
"Commuting back and forth kind of saved me," he said, adding he gradually found artistic inspiration and started painting again. On Thursday, Minjarez stood by his paintings along Main Street -- one of a Kansas landscape, "very minimal" that included a tiny farm, vast sky and flat field; the other an art piece showing off his culture.
Carole Geier, with Southwest Arts and Humanities Council, said the artworks are "all really different, individual" and are a way to get people downtown.
"The more you can get people downtown, the better," she said, adding that cities across the country are trying to build up their downtown areas and draw people. "Why shouldn't that be the same here?"
Geier's artwork is titled "Seeing Red!" and "Big Bluestem." She said she saw these shoes -- high heels, but too high for her. "But I thought they were really great," she said. So she painted "Seeing Red," thinking she could at least paint the shoes if she couldn't wear them.
Meli Hernandez said there's a lot of art in the community, "you just kind of have to look for it." He said the banner walk is one way to get his name out there as an artist, adding he likes the freedom of picking up a brush and blank sheet of paper or canvas and "letting your imagination just kind of flow."
For the banner walk, Hernandez's imagination flowed into painting a couple of Garden City's founding fathers, John Stevens and C.J. "Buffalo" Jones.
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