Art professor shows Arkansas’ beauty in airport
Neal Harrington is carving space for travelers passing through the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, Adams Field to immerse themselves in all things Arkansas.
Harrington was chosen from 49 applicants to create art that will highlight the state’s natural beauty, welcoming travelers arriving in the airport to our state.
The project, a wood-carving triptych at a “not-to-exceed fee of $90,648.59” — including installation of the three 3.5-foot-by-6-foot birch panels — is part of the Art in the Airport series, a multi-phased initiative to feature the work of Arkansas artists showcasing the state’s natural beauty and culture.
“The whole project, as an umbrella, I’m calling ‘Arkansas As Home,’ and then they all have ‘Home’ titles,” says Harrington, artist and professor of art at Arkansas Tech University at Russellville.
“Down Home” showcases the state’s water regions, he says, and “Homegrown” features the mountainous parts of the state. The third panel of the triptych, titled “Home Sweet Home,” is all about the Arkansas Delta.
“The imagery in these panels references the Americana/Arkansas landscape and Southern traditions of craft, storytelling, music, and the human condition that make up our state’s specific milieu. Each panel will focus on a specific terrain,” Shane Carter, the airport’s director of public affairs and government relations, wrote in his proposal recommending Harrington.
Harrington is a two-time recipient of the Delta Exhibition Delta Award from what is now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and has also been recognized with awards from Boston Printmakers Biennial, the 2016 Pacific States Biennial North American Printmaking Exhibition, the Prints U.S.A. Annual National Print Exhibition at Artlink and the Arkansas Art Council’s Small Works on Paper touring exhibition. He received the 2017 Beaux Arts Award from the River Valley Arts Center in Russellville, and in 2018, he won the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship based on nominations by his peers at Arkansas Tech.
Harrington applied for the Art in the Airport opportunity on the spur of the moment. He was mowing his lawn in the spring of 2022 and had gone inside for a lunch break when he heard Craig O’Neill announce the art contest on KTHVTV. The deadline was just four days away.
“My son really encouraged me to apply,” says Harrington, tugging gently at his long beard as he talks. His son, Jake, is a business major at
Arkansas Tech. His daughter, Olive, is a high school junior. “I entered kind of on a whim, just hoping to be one of the finalists, because the finalists got $1,500 just to sketch out [their] ideas.”
He knew Tiffany Black, the artist chosen to do a terrazzo floor near the TSA counter — “Over an Arkansas Sky,” a landscape of Arkansas flora and fauna. Black was an adjunct professor at Arkansas Tech.
“She was our Artist in Residence, and we were friends,” he says. “She had won that design competition and she invited a few of us colleagues out there for the unveiling, and I was like, ‘Man, this is really cool that they’re doing art out at the airport. I would love to do that.’”
His written artist’s statement and outline of ideas led to him being selected as one of four finalists. Next he drew sketches of his concept and created a PowerPoint presentation about what he wanted to do.
“It was open media — it could be a mural or metal or whatever, but I’m a printmaker and I do big wood cuts,” he says.
THUMBNAIL-SKETCH START
Harrington brainstormed what he wanted to include in each of the three panels, starting with thumbnail sketches before laying out the composition.
“I was like, I want to have maybe some kayakers in the background — that’s very popular around here
— and then I had a sketch of a deer,” he says. “I added some bees, because I didn’t have that in the original sketch, and I wanted to have Monarchs and a mockingbird and apple blossoms and maybe apples or peaches, gators, frogs. I wish I could have snuck a gar in there because they’re so cool, but how are you going to do that?”
“Home Sweet Home,” he says, is an allusion to the title of a well-known blues song, “Sweet Home Chicago.”
“I really love music — Americana and blues and rock and all of that kind of stuff, and so I wanted to bring some of that in,” he says, pointing to a bridge toward the upper right. “This is vaguely referencing the bridge into Little Rock but yet still dealing with a West Memphis, maybe, kind of influence, and so I’ve got the Americana pickers over here … .”
Harrington has checked his work with a biologist friend along the way to make sure his wildlife sketches are accurate. He works in the downstairs studio of the home he shares with his wife, Tammy, a professor of two-dimensional art at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, amid art supplies and memorabilia collected over the years.
SOUTH DAKOTA NATIVE
Harrington grew up in Rapid City, S.D., and moved to Arkansas in 2001 to take a job as art professor at Arkansas Tech. He lives near the Bona Dea Trails, where he walks for about two hours almost every day through wetlands and low woods.
“I go early, right at about sun-up and I see all kinds of wildlife,” he says.
He met Tammy at the University of South Dakota, where he was working on his bachelor of fine arts in painting.
“I never went into painting. I kind of came to carving these things late,” Harrington says.
He had tried graphic design, but that did not feel like the right fit.
“I heard printmaking was really hard,” he says, “but it looked neat because I’m more of a people person because a lot of times painters are solitary.”
His wife encouraged him to give printmaking a go.
“My art galleries were the 7-Eleven and mini-mart comic book stands,” he says. “The kind of imagery I like is very illustrative, like comic book stuff, which in the ’90s was the kiss of death at art school. They just did not take it seriously. And now I’ve kind of grown out of it but still that’s my influence.”
INFLUENCERS
Harrington got a master of fine arts in printmaking from Wichita State University in Wichita, Kan. He sought out works by fine artists whose styles are more illustrative, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
“A real big influence was a guy named Lynd Ward,” says Harrington of the artist credited as having influenced the development of the graphic-novel trend. “He would do these whole novels in the 1920s that were just pictures. There was no text in them. That was a huge influence on me.”
That influence shows up in this project, as he tells entwining stories within the fibers of wood that will be hung in the airport’s pre-security lobby.
“I wanted to draw comic book covers, which is common with artists, I think. It turns out that’s what everybody wants to do, and it’s hard to do that,” he says. “But the number one for me in my art is that I try really hard to get good compositions. It’s not just a random layout of things. Comic book covers, they’re meant to pull you in and get you to buy it, and it’s kind of like, ‘How do you tell a whole story with that one picture?’”
He is happy to have gotten the chance to tell Arkansas’ story in three.
“These will be flush to the wall and it will be a beautiful kind of blond wood paneling with a special rail lighting on it. It will be really nice. I’m excited.”