Junk Art Adds Grace To Omaha, Lincoln
If you want to start a bar room fight, you don’t have to praise Trump or insult Sanders, but just say loudly how much you like the new junk art installed on public property.
Lincoln has just announced that a new sculpture by world-famous artist Fletcher Benton will be placed in a park. It cost more than a half million dollars and looks like, well, a pile of junk.
So-called junk art, or found art, has been around for a century and the artists creating it have included Picasso, Miro, Chagall and Claes Oldenburg who is most famous for things such his Torn Notebook (at UNL) which isn’t so much junk as a huge oddity.
The magazine Art News published an article three years ago about the 10 most hated pieces of public art and, not surprisingly, five of them were junk art.
However, many of them have come to be loved once the weirdness wears off. Consider the Picasso gracing the Chicago civic center, put in place about a half century ago, or the pioneering work by Father Leland Lubbers of Creighton whose junk art is found all over Omaha. His works are nationally displayed and highly revered, although back in the 60s, locals looked at it and said: “Huh?”
Now, Omaha is teeming with public outdoor art, much of it clearly junk art or art created from metal which might well be fabricated into beams, cars, or a host of found objects. It is all over the city from the Joslyn, to the downtown to Little Italy to the north and south sides. It is extraordinarily creative and provocative and radiates beauty which may only be in the eyes of some beholders.
The new Lincoln piece was fabricated by a man who has a breathtaking world-wide reputation. His works are in the Met in New York as well as the Whitney; the V&A in London and the Denver Art Museum and now in a lovely park in a part of the capitol which was only recently a depressed and ugly part of town.
Now, the art will delight surprised visitors and should remind us of Father Lubbers’ idea that his style of art reveals the humorous dimension of life.
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