We’ve talked about the astonishing number of venues for musical performances on offer in Bisbee, and what a special thing that is. But there are even more fine art galleries here, and these attract visitors from across Southern Arizona, the nation, and yes, the world. Over a dozen such facilities makes a scene locally, and a destination for folks beyond the Tunnel. Not only that, but the walls of local cafes, restaurants and other businesses often wind up serving as impromptu gallery space as well. Add to it the many murals adorning exterior walls, the many outdoor sculptures, not to mention the work of local graffiti artists and you wind up with a critical mass of visual art.
It is no surprise that this critical mass would naturally cause artist studios to spring up alongside it. How could it be otherwise? It’s an artists’ colony after all.
They make it look easy and fun, but art takes work, and artists need time–and space–dedicated to the work. Bisbee counts among its residents a good deal of artists and many are fortunate to have their own studio space at home or elsewhere. These precious resources are not always easy to come by, especially for younger specimens, travelers or those who don’t have dedicated space of their own. To have such space available for artists who need it is a boon.
To have an entire three story school repurposed as artist and community space is another level entirely.
To claim Central School Project as the heart of the Bisbee artist community sounds like an overstatement, but Bisbee is bursting at the seams with superlatives and that’s what this blog series is all about, so we’re leaning into it here once again. Central School after all was present at the creation of so much of today’s Bisbee arts and cultural scene, starting all the way back in 1985. Central School was once the primary school for Bisbee children. Now its clasrooms and other facilities are home to 21 studios for members, spaces which local artists have rotated in and out of over its over 40-year history. CSP has community space available for meetings and workshops, multi-use spaces for all sorts of shenanigans like poetry readings and concerts; a theater for plays or free movie screenings monthly inside, or on the big screen in the parking lot, weather permitting. CSP holds the Make Festival each spring, making arts crafts and overall good fun for children of all ages. Make Fest is coming up on March 21st; a CSP Members’ Exhibition is coming up on February 6th.
And of course, it’s an art gallery. Today I got to visit CSP, take a tour with Executive Director Laurie McKenna, and…and…see some of the most stunningly beautiful paintings from reknowned Southern Arizona artists, Paul and Steve Bovee.
They say that once one spends enough time in the American southwest the landscapes, the climate, the people, the seasons, the stark natural beauty, at once enchanting but also dangerous, well…it “gets in your blood,” and it’s true. Having lived in Southern Arizona some 25 years, it sure got into mine. The childlike wonder that a flatlander, a Gulf Coast Houstonite gets from beholding even the most “unremarkable” Arizona hills and mountains for the first time is nigh impossible to convey in words. Staring at the Bovee’s gorgeous landscape paintings made those early enchantments come rushing back, like the memory of love’s first kiss but with a twist. Namely, the impossible sense of expeiencing it all over again, decades later when such swooning memories should rightly be consigned to the past.
Yet here it is, rushing back from the past and into the present, almost like cheating fate. Laurie McKenna points to a landscape painting as I stare like a lovesick fool at 3D relief knife-strokes casting shadows in the perfect lighting. She’s explaining how Bovee’s style here clearly has a toe-hold in the work of the great French Impressionists of old, but how he has clearly mastered that style and made it his own, such that his work is of it but no longer in it, and…and her words fade from earshot as I stare, longing to just jump into the canvas, climb to the top of that ridge and howl at the moon.
Laurie has been Director of CSP for 10 years now. Under her stewardship this time-honored Bisbee institution continues to be a real dynamo, providing arts, culture, and entertainment programming as well as space for artists here and everywhere to have a place where they can hone their craft and produce fine art like that currently on display in the old schoolhouse. CSP is an artists’ colony within an artists’ colony, the Center of the Tootsie Pop, a laborotory in which veterans like the Bovee brothers can hold a retrospective and up-and-coming artists can practice their way to perfection.
Keith Allen Dennis is a Bisbee writer, living the dream of becoming the songster he was meant to be. Currently he is contemplating a GoFundMe, a bake sale, or possibly High Crimes and Misdemeanors, whatever it takes to raise money to acquire one of the Bovee’s paintings. Find his music at http://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com.