Starting today, you can follow the Copyright Alliance on its 35-state road trip by watching artist interviews and reading blog entries, as we showcase artists and creators at work in copyright-dependent jobs across America.
For a town of 80,000 people, Sioux City has a thriving arts community and a populace strongly supportive of the arts, I learned in my time there. Todd Behrens, curator for the Sioux City Art Center, filled me in on the scene. The Center has a gallery of permanent and rotating collections of Sioux City artists and what Todd says is a made-up geographic region, “Siouxland,” that basically involves those who live in communities in proximity to the Big Sioux River. (That’s the river that produced those cool falls I featured in the South Dakota state video.)
The Art Center, an impressive facility, has an equally impressive history that is explained in the video. It also has a wide array of classrooms for students from little kids to elderly kids-at-heart.
There was one local artist’s work being displayed that caught my eye. He does work with stencils, amazing work, not like the stenciling I did of my daughter’s room when she was an infant (painting bunnies and other gentle creatures around her door frame). Todd told me the artist, Paul Chelstad, is a muralist who did a massive work of a musician’s head (hung behind the musician when he performed in town live) and that the work is now displayed in a local coffee shop. How did it fit in there? My biggest regret of my time in Sioux City is that I didn’t track down that coffee shop, but if you’re passing through, please find it and let me know what you think.
