From Root to Crown: A Conversation with Bo Bartlett
A Conversation with Bo Bartlett
At the 2019 Portrait Society conference, Bo Bartlett will attend to accept the Excellence in Fine Art Education award for his innovative work at the recently opened Bo Bartlett Center and to give a mainstage presentation titled “Let Your Root Feed Your Crown.” As an artist, activist and educator, Bartlett has committed his life to service through art—both in his hometown community of Columbus, Georgia, and the artist community, at large. Recently, I had the chance to speak with Bartlett about his work with the Center, growing up in the South, and his philosophic views on life and painting.
What inspired you to take on such a monumental project in creating The Bo Bartlett Center? What has that journey been like so far?
The Center was not originally my idea. It was Otis Scarborough’s, my brother-inlaw. He was a collector of my work and wanted to do something with his collection. He had considered gifting it to several museums, but he didn’t want it to end up gathering dust in a basement vault. At the time, he was on the board of Columbus State University. One day he was talking with then-president Frank Brown, and Brown said that the university would not only be happy to take the paintings, but that they would build a facility to permanently exhibit them.
This offer was exactly what my brother-in-law was looking for because he wanted to have an inherent educational aspect—a learning center. I was busy painting away in Philadelphia at the time, and I said, “That’s great, you guys go ahead and do that. I’m busy painting.” Over time, a seed of possibility was planted, and I began to take an interest in the project. I began to see how it could be mutually beneficial. I had read Suzi Gablik’s book The Reenchantment of Art. In it she writes about the importance of creating art that is not a static object—not art for art’s sake, but creating art that is interactive with the community, that shapes and forms and transforms a place in a holistic interaction with its inhabitants and environment. The concept of the Center began to grow and evolve for me. I realized that it could be more than just a museum-like gallery space for the exhibition of paintings. It could be a catalyst for change—substantive change.
Halloween, oil on linen, 82 x 100" (208 x 254 cm)
The Center is in your hometown of Columbus, Georgia, where you have returned to live in your childhood home. How has Columbus and the South, in general, inspired your work? And, how do you see the Center’s role in your community? When I was a kid growing up in Georgia, I knew nothing about art. There was a tiny museum in the home of one of the town’s philanthropists, the Bradley Family. We had one art teacher, Mrs. Tanner, who made the rounds to all the public schools in the district. She came to my elementary school every other Thursday. There was no way to know much about the art world in the Deep South in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If art came into the library on the cover of a magazine such as Time, Life or The Saturday Evening Post, then we may have encountered it, but otherwise we were isolated.
Columbus has changed a lot since I left at age 18 in 1974. My quest to learn more about art took me to Florence and eventually Philadelphia, where I studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. By establishing the Center in my hometown, I felt like there was an opportunity to give back to the community that had engendered my spirit and offer something that was still lacking—a contemporary art center attached to an institution of higher learning that has the capability to interface with the entire community.
My work has always been informed by that place, my home, Columbus. It is a beautiful small southern town. After spending years in friendship with Andrew Wyeth in Pennsylvania, I realized the importance of an artist painting what they know best—their home. I was painting my home for years
before I moved back there to help open the Center. Most of my most iconic paintings of the 1990s deal with memories of home and the yearning for the larger concept of an archetypal Home. The light there is beautiful, raking across the iron oxide dust particulates in the Alabama sky, mixing with the mist of the rapids of the whitewater of the Chattahoochee, creating a golden pink light in the late afternoons—it is otherworldly and inspiring. Returning to Columbus to build the Center has been a homecoming, and I realize how many ways the city has changed and the ways it has remained the same. It is still the South, with all the richness and complexities that entails.
You do a lot of community outreach through the Center. Can you talk about one program that has influenced or affected you or your work the most?
There is, and long has been, a gnawing sense of urgency in the South to right the wrongs of the past. We have to face each day where we are now, and every day brings new challenges. With the Center, we have gone into the Muscogee County schools with groups of volunteers. We have had art programs with the disabled. Every other week we run a program in the Muscogee County Jail with inmates. We have plans to develop an art therapy program with a local mental health facility, as well as working with soldiers with PTSD at Fort Benning. But so far, it is our homeless outreach program, “Home Is Where The Art Is,” that has been the most life altering and one of the biggest rewards of opening the Center.
I began the program after being influenced by a student from one of my Master Classes, Stacy Underwood, who had started a similar program in a church basement in Jackson, Mississippi.
We have local artist volunteers, sometimes mixed with church groups, social workers or schools groups providing the homeless community with the opportunity to paint on a weekly basis. We have run the program for four years and each year we have an exhibition where the homeless participants can sell their work. We have seen the sense of self-worth grow exponentially in so many participants. Some have gained enough confidence to get jobs and get back on their feet. Some participants have become practicing artists and have even sold enough work to get apartments and studios. The volunteers, many of whom previously had limited encounters with the homeless, now know everyone by name and the exchanges on the streets in town have transformed the sense of community.
I noticed that the title of your talk for next year’s conference, “Let Your Root Feed Your Crown,” comes from the novels of Robertson Davies. Can you explain a little about what this quote means and how it guides your work?
Yes, that’s the whole thing. As I said, Andrew Wyeth painted his own world, his own backyard. It was his own to paint. He owned it. No one else did. We can live fully in the present but still honor our past. Andrew Wyeth said that his art is based on two things: seeing clearly what was in front of him in the present moment, married with a sense of memory. Our whole lives have to be incorporated into our work. We all have our own unique DNA. No two people are alike. We have all been influenced by a unique set of experiences that inform and define us.
In the Cornish Trilogy, when Davies writes, “let your root feed your crown,” it is almost Kabbalistic, but I translate it to mean that we should take everything we are—our biology, our ancestry, our experiences and let them be the thing that informs and nourishes us. It is like the roots of a tree gathering the nutrients in the ground, which then moves through us, through our trunk, our life, to be the thing that we show to the world—like the leaves of a tree, our foliage, our fruitfulness. So, when I say, “let your root feed your crown,” I’m just encouraging you to be truly yourself, to honor your uniqueness. There is no need to emulate another when you want to make art. Yes, it is good to ingest and digest our influences, to absorb what you love, but make it your own. Be true to your temperament. There is no other way. A kid growing up in the country, who looks at the wild grass blowing in the late afternoon, is going to be a very different person with a different worldview, than a kid who grew up in Brooklyn looking at the colorful markings of graffiti scrawled across the side of a train car. One is not any better than another. They are both valid and their art will be “true” if they are true to their root, to their temperament, regardless of style, genre, influences or later experiences.
The key is to open up to who we truly are—to share ourselves and our art with the world. It takes great courage. Because nothing like it has ever existed before. True creativity wants to run through our veins and become whole and new through us. We are just the conduits for creativity. It has nothing to do with us. It’s much larger than us. But we have to be present to allow it to flow. We have to show up. And be awake.