M.T. Liggett, 86; lined road with provocative art

It's a big sky that looms over the flat, windswept plains of western Kansas, where the horizon bristles with silos, windmills and oil derricks, and where railroad crossing signals come alive with flashing lights, loud honks and swinging booms at any hour of day.

But nothing in the small town of Mullinville is quite as striking as the roadside forest of jutting, jagged totems erected by M.T. Liggett, a sharecropper's son who spent three decades erecting more than 300 provocative, vivid metal sculptures and whirligigs.

Most of them stand over 10 feet, and all were hand- wrought in a nearby shop where Liggett, who died Aug. 17 at 86, filled the air with the sizzle of arc welding and the strains of his favorite composer, Rachmaninoff.

Everyone from presidents and county officials to celebrities and Greek gods was celebrated or excoriated with scabrous glee. Old girlfriends came in for a sly, gentle touch.

One piece lampooned the state board of education, featuring one of its members lurking in a toilet bowl.

Another commemorated the Monica Lewinsky era of Bill Clinton's presidency with a simple, if stained, blue dress.

Liggett worked with scrap metal, disused tractor parts and heavy irrigation pipe, in a style that seemed to mix elements of sculptor Richard Serra, Haitian sheet-metal art and county highway signs. His cartoonish, sometimes grotesque silhouettes always left room for block-letter slogans, ranging from the sassy ("Yassir Arafat: He-Ain't-From-Brooklyn"), to the gnomic ("Camus: Absurdity").