In Conversation with Bo Bartlett: The Bo Bartlett Center’s past, present and future, and finding common ground through art

On an overcast day, as the sun broke through a light rain long enough for me to walk from my car to the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, which houses the Bo Bartlett Center, I waited for Columbus-born artist of international renown, Bo Barltett, in the lobby area. I had visited The Center many times since the opening reception on Jan. 19, and I had always been struck by the contrast in these experiences—the energy and hum of several hundred people on opening night compared to the soothing vacancy of The Center during regular open hours.

When Bo arrived, dressed in a light gray blazer daubed at the cuffs with paint, he seemed to come out of the walls of the gallery itself. The main gallery’s high ceilings, tall enough to amply accommodate his larger works, benefit from the skylight above. During our conversation, part of which is printed here, he explained, in his soft-spoken, eloquent manner, an element of the ambiance that had always intrigued me: the soundscape.

“My son, in New York, is an artist,” Bo said, “but he works with sound a lot. That’s his piece echoing around. We chose that particular piece because it works with the brain, with the MRI.”

The sound drones, elevating and fading at intervals that seem to draw me through the galleries. I had always thought it light enough to be unobtrusive, but I could never quite pin down why it helped me feel so rooted as I wandered around The Center. As our conversation developed, I began to better understand. The Bo Bartlett Center is a kind of nexus through which all variety of community synapses might fire. It is a home to both enthusiasm and introspection, accommodating crowds as well as the individual. There are also, I realized as Bo continued, surprises everywhere.

“The little pops and crackles we hear, which play into it in a beautiful way, I think, is the material used for the skylight. Depending on whether the sun is out or not, it expands and contracts. You think it’s something falling on the roof. It’s with the temperature shifts you get the crackle.”

In the Bo Bartlett Center, there is always a new crackle to discover. Whether viewing works in the Visiting Artists galleries, or the Scarborough and Candler Galleries, which house Bo’s work, surprises wait around every corner. Stolid and certain as the works are, wait a while, give them time, and as the soundscape entrances you, you will find still more crackles popping out here and there, tiny explosions, the subtle firing of synapses as you move through Columbus’s most intensely mystifying gallery spaces.

Bo and I spoke for nearly an hour, about The Center’s past, present and future, which you will find here, edited for clarity and length. Bo was also gracious enough to show me around and speak at length about specific works on display. Our conversations about specific paintings will be printed in future issues. This is the first part of our tour.

Tom Ingram: Tell us about the genesis and evolution of The Center, how it came to be here.

Bo Bartlett: My brother-in-law, Otis Scarborough, started collecting my work when I was young. This is sort of the way it truly evolved. When I was young, in my early 20s or early 30s, it would be the end of the year and I would have a tax bill due—I was an artist, I wasn’t planning ahead necessarily—and so at the end of the year I owed a certain amount of money. I’d call him and say, “hey, do you want to buy a painting?” And he would say, “yeah, sure.” So he would buy a painting for the amount that was due, you know. It was great. He started to build this collection, and the prices of the paintings started to go up, and the tax bills started to go up, so it was all proportionate. Eventually it got to the point where at the end of each year I’d have a couple of big paintings that maybe hadn’t sold because they were too big to go anywhere, and he would say, “I’ll take that one.” I would show him what was available, so he started to collect these large ones. A time came when he had to decide what to do with them. A lot of them were just rolled up. He didn’t have the space to show them. He started talking to the Columbus Museum and other places, and CSU stepped up and said, we’ll build a museum for them.

I remember him [Otis Scarborough] calling me, because he thought it would take twenty years. I remember him calling me and saying, “it’s going to happen right now, it’s going to happen next year, they’re gonna start building”—this was way back, twenty years ago—and I was like, “it’s gonna happen now?” So I had to come down and start to look at the architect’s drawings. That was way back, and it did in the end, after raising money and getting it right, going through all the iterations it had to go through, finally he had a collection and they [CSU] built the space. And here we are.

TI: Now that we hav this space, maybe you can talk a little about the role the community will have, the role The Center will have in growing and sustaining the arts community.

BB: We have a disabled program that works with New Horizons. We have a school program, Art Makes You Smart, where we go into schools, and they will start to come here, now that The Center is here. And we have a jail program where we go into the jails on Mondays. I’m there for a lot of these.

The whole idea, originally, Otis’s vision for this, was a building with three wings. There would be a museum spot, where we could exhibit large paintings; an education spot, like a school; and an outreach, community party. He actually imagined a building that looked like that, a three-winged building. It is that, but that in theory, not in practice. We have a large exhibition space, there’s archives, there’s storage, and all of the outreach stuff goes on, tendrils out in the community from here.

I feel good about the way it’s going, all quadrants, an all-levels approach, to speak on a holistic level. Here [in the Center] we have the aesthetic approach, where you can come in and have an emotional or intellectual or spiritual relationship to the art; and so a certain strata of the community is gonna want to come in and do that. And we’ll have seasonally rotating exhibitions in the two visiting artist galleries. Then you have the outreach, going out into the community in a more social-minded way, so we reach all strata of the community. It’s great for the participants, it’s great for the volunteers; we have a large volunteer pool of mostly artists and board members, and they’re helping with all the programs.

You walk down the street now and see a homeless person painting at a table. Instead of sitting there doing what they may have been doing previously, which was loitering, now they’re painting and selling their wares. We have a great, growing contingent of “homeless” Columbus artists. Homeless in quotes because now [through the program] they’re getting a sense of self worth, they’re getting places to live. We have some people who were honestly under the trees in cardboard boxes when they started coming to the program, and now with that sense of agency, they have apartments, some even have apartments and studios. It’s really been a great thing to see.

We started the jail program thinking it would just be isolated to the jail. Turns out when they get out of jail, they come straight to the homeless program, because it’s a productive thing to do.

TI: So there’s a continuity there?

BB: There’s a continuity. They get out, they keep working with us, and all of the sudden they, too, are gaining in their self worth and sense of pride in what they’re doing. That one I hadn’t imaged. It was a great surprise how one fed into the other. We thought of them [the programs] as separate things. We still have plans to work with some of the psychological aspects of it, such as at the Bradley Center, especially with teens and addiction, and also at Fort Benning. These are programs we are waiting to implement. My hands are so full right now, I’m trying to figure out when—who’s gonna come on and help me do it.

TI: You mentioned holistic, and it seems like things are moving in that direction. It’ll be interesting to see how all of these different programs overlap in the future.

BB: You know, Columbus has got that great sense of diversity, and I think this is one of those programs that draws lines of connection through the community, and aspects of the community that weren’t connected before. So it allows a kind of intermingling and understanding, and empathy grows in the process.

TI: Speaking of connectivity, I’ve seen it, I believe your own words, where you talk about connective tissue between opposing ideas, moving beyond dualistic thinking. So there’s opposing ideas and some sort of synthesis that you hope to bring through your work. I’d like to go around and talk about some specific pieces [of art in the gallery], but generally, before we get to that, would you speak to that particular issue in your work and maybe also how it has changed over the years?

BB: I think that art is a bridge. Art can be a bridge. Like many of the other things in the arts, writing or music, it can be a place where people with opposing views can find common ground, commonality. I’ve seen the oldest, most conservative person standing at amazement in from of a painting, right next to the wildest, most radical young art student—they’re just looking at a painting, they’re finding connective tissue there, the story speaks to them. I think that art has to be transpartisan. I think that what w’re striving for is a place where we rise about it. Right now we’re stuck in that duality, we’re stuck in the two-sided struggle.

TI: Seems like that [two-sided struggle] is particularly entrenched at our current moment.

BB: People just get siloed in their own Twitter feed or TV station, and they’re just more and more ensconced in their way of being. But what we’re hoping to do is find ways for us to get out of those silos, to start conversations across the board. That’s where I think that The Center—one of the goals is to be a place where the whole community can come and find a version of evolution, psychological evolution, where we’re transpartisan. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s gotta happen.

TI: I like that phrase, transpartisan. My editorial stance has been nonpartisan. I’ll have to consider changing, adjusting the language a little bit.

BB: I believe we can do it through art. I believe we can find a common ground. It’s basically putting yourself in other people’s shoes, because when you stop, slow down and start looking at something, just by the nature of the act, you do become more objective, less subjective. You shed that stuff and just let your eyes do the searching.

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Next month, we will run the first in a series of conversations, in which Bo explains work currently on display in The Center. The Bo Bartlett Center is upstairs in the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, at 921 Front Avenue, Columbus, Ga.