Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Brad Cushman
An artist himself, Cushman has always seen the ‘outsiders’ in art and worked to give them insider opportunities. Now, having retired from UALR, he is keeping busy traveling and creating, this time with words.
Retirement seems to agree with Brad Cushman. In April, he left his post as art gallery director and curator of exhibits at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he’d worked for 22 years. Since then, he and husband Bobby Williams Cushman have traveled in the United States and Europe, and Brad, an accomplished visual artist, has taken up writing.
“I talked with friends who were retired, and they all said that you have to have a plan,” the 60-year-old says of his post-9-to-5 life. “If that is to sit around and read books and relax then, well, that’s a plan.”
Hard to believe that Cushman would be sitting around much. He’s too busy having fun. This is, after all, the guy who used thousands of peanuts to transform a 1976 Oldsmobile Delta 88 into “The Big Peanutmobile” for the Houston Artcar Parade. He’s also not one to ever turn down a party invitation, and he maintains an active and vibrant social media presence with Bobby.
“He and Bobby are go-getters,” says artist Katherine Strause, who’s been Cushman’s friend since 1986. “They are going to travel and party and live that life.”
Of course art will play a central role, as it always has for Cushman. The west Little Rock home he shares with Bobby, with its epic view of the Arkansas River in the distance, is filled with paintings, sculpture and mixed media pieces by friends such as Strause, Delita Martin, V.L. Cox, Thom Hall and Hugo Crosthwaite. Cushman’s passion for folk art is also displayed via works by Ronald Koehler, Eddie Arning, Mose Tolliver and more. And, yes, some of his own work is on the walls.
“I wasn’t a sports kid,” he says while seated at table at his house on a dreary, rainy December morning. “I got interested in art and theater, and over the years I’ve met so many amazing people from all walks of life who make art.”
“I still think about curatorial projects. I worked on deadlines for the next show, the next talk, next year’s schedule. I did that for 22-and-a-half years. It’s hard to turn that off, but I’ve been able to pull back. I’m finding projects to fill the time, and it’s starting to feel more comfortable. It feels right and good. I’m just navigating through it as it’s unfolding.”
HIDING A DIAGNOSIS
Cushman grew up in Springfield, Ill. His parents, Gene and Ruth, met after Gene returned from World War II, where he served with the Army in the South Pacific. (After the war, he became a banker.) They married in 1948, but Cushman and his older brother Doug didn’t enter the picture until the early ’60s.
Cushman was born premature at seven months, and there were complications. He wore leg braces until he was about 12, when he decided he didn’t want to wear them any longer. He has dealt with mobility issues his whole life and uses an arm crutch when he walks.
Cushman was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was young, something he didn’t know until years later.
“My mom was in her 80s and at one point, she mentioned the cerebral palsy diagnosis,” he says. “That was the first time she’d ever said those words to me.”
In way, it may have worked to his advantage.
“They never put a name on it when I was a kid, and whether that was intentional or not, it was probably for the best,” he says. Had he known what it was called, he figures, he may have imposed limitations on himself. As it happened, his childhood was filled with playing and activities.
“We lived in a sort of cookie-cutter, Mayberrytype neighborhood. It was a 1960s nuclear family,” Cushman says. “We would spend weekends on the farm where my mom grew up. There were pigs and cows and all of that.”
As a child, he made little boats from found pieces of wood and would play with them in the creek near his home. He also put on carnivals in his back yard.
“My creative outlet then was just playing, and that was great,” he says.
His fifth-grade teacher, Pat Abbott, introduced him to art and books like Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
“That had a huge impact on me,” Cushman remembers, adding that Abbott’s daughter was his junior high school art teacher and taught him basic printmaking.
“We did these little intaglio pieces that we inked up, and I still do printmaking today. That shows you the impact of how being introduced to stuff early on can stay with you.”
Cushman graduated high school in 1980 and attended Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill., where, influenced by his father’s practicality, he started off studying advertising and business administration.
“I realized I was not an ad guy, and I was not a graphic designer,” he says with a chuckle.
He kept taking more and more art classes and spent a transformative semester his junior year in New York.
“I was hooked,” he says. “I met artists and gallery people. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was like a carnival, exciting, exhilarating and amazing.”
He returned to Illinois College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art with a minor in business administration. He applied to graduate school programs and, after a round of rejections — six in all, he says — he was accepted at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where he earned a master of fine arts in painting in 1986.
Cranbrook is also where Cushman developed an interest in folk art under the tutelage of sculpture professor Michael D. Hall, who introduced him to artists like Edgar Tolson, Martin Ramirez and Rosetta Burke. Hall took Cushman and other students to Detroit to see the sprawling mixed media installation “New Jerusalem (Paradise)” Burke had created around her home.
Writing about the experience in the catalog for “A Visionary Vernacular Road Trip,” the 2021 folk and outsider artist exhibit he curated for the Windgate Center for Art + Design at UALR, Cushman reflected:
“This was my first pilgrimage to an ‘outsider’ artist’s environment. Burke’s calling made me question who could be an artist, and my conclusion was that anyone could be an artist.”
‘THE BIG PEANUTMOBILE’
While in college, Cushman made some Little Rock connections, which led him in 1985 to UALR, where he taught drawing and art appreciation part time. He also taught at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway for a couple of semesters through 1987 before signing on full time to teach at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant, where he would spend the next 12 years and eventually become the school’s chairman of the Department of Art.
It was while in Oklahoma that he got involved with the art scene there and in Texas. Along with “The Big Peanut mobile” that he created with art students and his mechanic friend Mickey Howley — it actually ended up as a character in the novel “Shell Shaker” by LeAnne Howe — he also covered the same car with more than 1,600 neckties, dubbed it “The Tie Rod,” and drove it to sign his contract with UALR in 2000.
“Durant was great, but I was ready for something new,” Cushman says.
In his role as gallery director, Cushman was in charge of the school’s exhibition program, managing its art collection, teaching and fundraising.
In an April interview about his retirement with Angelita Faller at ualr.edu, Cushman, whose name is on the main gallery at the Windgate Center for Art + Design, said:
“My passion as a gallery director was to put together exhibits that celebrated diversity and inclusion. I felt that it was important in gallery programming to represent the voices that were underrepresented — Black artists, Hispanic artists, minority artists, LGBTQ artists, and women artists. It was a good forum for those discussions across disciplines.”
Mia Hall, executive director of Penland School of Craft near Asheville, N.C., was a professor of furniture design at UALR. She and her husband, David Clemons, a former metalsmith professor at the school, came to UALR in 2007 from San Diego and were floored by Cushman’s curatorial skills.
“The first time we came to the university, Brad had put together the exhibit ‘Taking Possession,’ which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the [desegregation crisis at] Little Rock Central High School,” Hall says. “It was a who’s-who of African American contemporary art. We couldn’t quite believe that he’d gotten work from all of these artists.”
The exhibit left her and Clemons with “this sense of belonging and a sense of excitement,” she says.
As she got to know Cushman, Hall realized that he didn’t treat the UALR art department and its galleries as small-market operations.
“He just didn’t see boundaries. When he wanted an exhibition, he would pick up the phone and call the biggest gallery in New York and say, ‘hey, I see you represent so-and-so, I’d like to borrow some art work.’ We ended up having some pretty phenomenal work shown in the gallery. He would just jump right in and not limit himself.”
Thom Hall, who spent 40 years at the Arkansas Arts Center as the museum’s registrar/collections manager before retiring in 2015, first met Cushman when he was still in Oklahoma. The two are close friends, and one of Hall’s artworks hangs in the Cushman home.
“When he came in, the gallery program at UALR was almost nonexistent,” Hall says. “Brad didn’t let that stop him. He tracked down sources, he traveled and saw stuff. He developed resources from all over the country, and wasn’t afraid to ask them to borrow things. The exhibitions he put together and the way he built the gallery program at UALR is phenomenal.”
California-based international art dealer Pierrette Van Cleve has been pals with Cushman for years. In 2018, after donating the painting “My Surrounding People” by Phan Thanh Minh to UALR in Cushman’s honor, she then donated her collection of Southeast Asian art to the school.
“He’s not a big fish in a little pond, he’s a big fish in any pond,” Van Cleve says. “Besides the fact that he’s a curatorial genius, he has an amazing eye for detail. He’s kind, he’s open, passionate, funny and can engage in a wide range of audiences. He’s a gem of a human being.”
THE PERFECT MATCH
Talk of Cushman doesn’t go long without a mention of husband Bobby. The pair met through a dating app in 2008, when Bobby was living in Maumelle and working as a long-haul trucker. A previous relationship had left Cushman wary of commitment, and they took things slowly for a while.
So Bobby, who now sells real estate, proposed they take a float trip down the Spring River, figuring that if they could survive that they could survive anything. It worked. They moved in together not long afterward and were married on Sept. 14, 2013, in a ceremony officiated by Van Cleve on the beach at Coronado Island near downtown San Diego.
Strause says the two are perfect for each other.
“They are so cute, and they really do like each other. That is so refreshing. Bobby is a truly remarkable person, and he’s real good to my friend.”
Cushman, the former voice of the short art segment “Picture This” on Little Rock NPR affiliate KUAR, has always maintained his own artistic practice, working mostly in mixed media and collage. His piece “Film/Strip/ Tease” won the Grand Award at the 44th Annual Delta Exhibition in 2001. He is represented by Boswell Mourot Fine Art in Little Rock, and his work has been exhibited at, among other places, UCA, Henderson State University, University of the Ozarks, UALR and Mighty Fine Art Gallery in Dallas.
“My own work isn’t that figurative, but if you look around, most of the work we collect is figurative,” he says, pointing out some of the works at his home.
He is also attracted to work by artists outside the mainstream.
“I think that because maybe growing up handicapped … seeing all the diverse voices in art and the artists that are maybe underrepresented, I’ve gravitated to those, the outsiders. I’ve collected that work because it resonates with me. It’s people speaking up for who they are.”
Lately he has turned to the written word, and one project in particular has found him learning about his father, who took his own life in 1999.
“It was a lot to process,” Cushman says. “Suicide is hard on the survivors. I was mad at my dad for a long time … at some point, I had to let that go. It was too much to carry, and it wasn’t his fault. … Something happened that pushed him to a point that was a really dark place.”
In 2012, as he was helping his mother move from her Springfield home into an assisted living facility, she gave Cushman a trove of letters his father had written to his parents during the war.
Ranging from February 1943 to January 1946, the letters, which Cushman hadn’t been aware of, are a portrait of his father as a young man. Still, it wasn’t until recently, with the thought that they might help him with a short story he was working on, that Cushman read them.
“Once I started, it was like reading a novel,” he says. “My dad was in finance, and there are numbers throughout these letters. ‘I got 45 letters this month.’ ‘I drank six Cokes and had two doughnuts.’
“I knew the man, but now I’m going, who was he at 20? He was a small-town kid, a star athlete, he was a popular guy. It was great to see him at that age. In the early letters there were lots of mundane things, but later he talked more about the war and his frustrations with being in the Army. He was ready to be out. I think they were in some pretty rough situations in Okinawa and in Japan.”
Along with being a window into his father’s life, Cushman is trying to suss out how the letters may end up in his own work.
“Will it be fuel for future short stories? Probably,” he says. “It’s still real fresh, and I don’t know yet. There’s a lot to mull over and figure out how to pull it together.”
GLOBETROTTERS
Last year Cushman was diagnosed with diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, also known as Forestier’s Disease, a bony hardening of the ligaments in areas where they attach to the spine. The diagnosis, along with working from home during the pandemic, helped motivate him to retire.
“I could tell my spine is getting more rigid,” he says. “That was a concern. We’ve sat at home for the past couple of years, and you go, ‘OK, what do I do to make the most out of the next chapter of my life,’ and we are trying to do that.”
It certainly isn’t slowing him down when it comes to traveling.
“We look at cities that are mobility friendly in the States and in Europe,” Cushman says. “We’re just trying to figure out how to navigate the terrain. Bobby’s so good. He said that he’s looking into all-terrain wheelchairs. He’s not going to let anything stop us from exploring the world.”
It has taken some adjustment getting accustomed to life as a retiree, he admits.
“I still think about curatorial projects. I worked on deadlines for the next show, the next talk, next year’s schedule. I did that for 22-and-a-half years. It’s hard to turn that off, but I’ve been able to pull back. I’m finding projects to fill the time, and it’s starting to feel more comfortable. It feels right and good. I’m just navigating through it as it’s unfolding.”