The Value of Local Artists
Written by Josh Cox, local artist and Ex-Officio Board Member for the Arts + Culture Alliance
My family and I moved to Marshalltown a little over 5 years ago and we love living here. As an artist, one of the first things that I really came to appreciate about this town was the abundance and vibrancy of its public art. I’ve been a working artist and arts programmer for the past 25 years and, having worked primarily in smaller cities and small towns, I’ve really grown to admire the way local arts scenes find a way to thrive in environments where you wouldn’t always expect to see them.
Small rural towns in the middle of ‘fly over country’ aren’t largely seen as cultural hot spots, so I was (and still am) taken with Marshalltown’s public murals and sculptures. They have an unexpectedly contemporary aesthetic and they’re forward-thinking rather than stuck on remembering and rehashing Marshalltown’s former self. Public art, especially murals and sculpture, are great not only for their obvious beautification but also because they show us how much the community loves and wants to improve their public spaces. But murals and sculptures are only a small part of our local and public art and they are only a fraction of what is making us a cultural hot spot.
The biggest and most significant cultural asset to any community, but especially Marshalltown, is its artists. Artists not only breathe life into their community through their creative outputs, but they often embrace and provide a unique perspective into the world around them – injecting new ideas and viewpoints into official and unofficial placemaking, inspiring new ways of ‘seeing’ their towns, and often reflecting a critical, yet loving, eye at their immediate surroundings.
Marshalltown is blessed with dozens of very talented, hard working, and passionate artists. Unfortunately, they might be hard to notice sometimes – probably because so many small town artists (myself included) have to work full-time jobs, are busy raising families, and are otherwise serving in the community. Most artists are only able to pursue their creative passions part-time at best. You might be amazed at how much creative work is produced in those small bits of time squeezed out of artists’ ‘real lives.’
When given the opportunity to connect with other artists and the ability to share their work with their community, artists often come out of the woodwork. These opportunities are here now in very exciting ways. With Marshalltown’s recent public funding initiatives, the MACC’s revitalization, the Arts + Culture Alliance’s new downtown storefront space, and local arts education continuing to inspire and teach, we are seeing Marshalltown’s creative community become visible. And grow.
There’s a saying that “society affects art and art affects society.” That is especially true in small communities. The art that local artists (and musicians and writers and dancers and actors) create is DIRECTLY inspired by their lives in their communities. Every brushstroke painted, every note played, every dance performed, every sentence written, is a direct expression of the artist’s life experiences (historical, physiological, emotionally, intellectually) filtered through their creativity. Good art can’t hide that fact, nor should it.
Artwork made in Marshalltown by Marshalltown artists is necessarily one of a kind. No one from outside our community can make the same artwork that we can, because no one from outside Marshalltown has lived the same experiences that we have. Our local artists produce work that is distinctly ‘of Marshalltown’ even if they’re not trying to. We can’t help it and we certainly can’t hide it.
And no one from outside our community can view and experience our artwork the same way we can – because no one from outside Marshalltown has the same experiences we have had as a community.
Each time a local artist produces a piece of artwork, we as a community have the opportunity to see ourselves in a unique way. We have the unique opportunity to see our lives and our dreams and our hopes and our fears reflected back at us through the gift of our artists’ work.