TWO - TWO - TWO Mimetic Architecture Icons at ONE JUNCTION!

Old Mill Dance Hall, Topeka Kansas, just across the street from the Skelly Gas Airplane... Wow!  The gems you can find in state digitized archives...

 

A photograph showing the entrance to The Old Mill dance hall located at Sixth Avenue and Gage Boulevard, Topeka, Kansas. Also visible in the photograph is Skelly Station No.2 which resembles an airplane.

Date: Between 1928 and 1930

Skelly Station No.2, Topeka, Kansas

A photograph of Skelly Station No.2, Topeka, Kansas. The gas station, which resembles an airplane, was located at Sixth Avenue and Gage Boulevard.

Date: Between 1928 and 1930

Giant MooCow - Foundation set!

I posted this about a month ago, when discussions were in the works for finding the World's Largest Tipping Moo-Cow a home in Lucas.  Well, it looks like the ball is rolling!  In an agreement with Wenzel Steel Works, co-creators of the MooCow, the Lucas Home Base will soon be the home base for the MooCow!  We dug and set two base timbers Sunday, so placement is set, and we're just waiting for the ground to dry enough to get the 3500 pound wonder delivered and in place.

 

Pictured here is Peregrine Honig, the conceptualist and artist for the piece, with design and fabrication executed by Wenzel Steel Works.  The piece was originally commissioned for the Kansas City "Avenue of the Arts" in 2002, and installed in an urban Kansas City setting.  It was again displayed in Kansas City (13th and Central) during May and June 2009.

Russian Embellishment

Russian blacksmith's house in a village near Yekaterinburg City, Russia.  Makes me reconsider my own recent re-painting scheme, moving from the current 'white' to something more exciting...  As found on English Russia website

 

World's Largest Tug-of-War Rope, Kumohji, Naha, Japan

 

Japanese folks from Kumoji, Naha, upheld their annual tradition of creating the mother of all tug-of-war rope when they put together a 656 foot long rope for the 39th Ryukyu Kingdom Festival Tsunahiki. Weighing 44 tons and measuring 4.5 feet in diameter, this rope had already broken the world record in 1997.

 

Find out more here:  http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/10/24/japan-creates-worlds-biggest-tugofwar-rope//

 

 

 

World's Largest Tabouleh Salad, Lebanon

Canada's Mammoth Cheese papers

Read it through Google Books

RVRR Does it again: TV Worth Watching, Tom Brinkmoeller on TV's coolest road trip

In 1967, Charles Kuralt invented a television genre when he began documenting simple and interesting parts of America and its people with his series of "On the Road" reports for CBS News.

In 1995, soon after Kuralt ended those reports, three guys from a Kansas public television station accidentally picked up the thread. And they've been having nothing but fun with it ever since.

Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations is a half-hour series that finds outsider art in all corners of the country, has fun making the discovery, and tries to include the creators of that art. It's a road trip with a trio of the coolest tour guides ever on public TV -- a kind of a Monty Python meets Rick Steves mix that tells you a lot about what you're seeing and makes you laugh at the same time.

Read the rest on their blog: TV Worth Watching

and we're SO very proud to be on some of their episodes. This article was from East Coast authors, with a little blurb at the bottom as to when/where to catch the show in Philadelphia and New York. Now THAT's coverage... GO! KCPT! GO!

Road Show: Art Cars and the Museum of the Streets

It's always lovely when a WLT Member puts out a new book, and Ruthann Godollei has been working on this one (along with Eric Dregni) for a few years... It's an inclusive look at Art Cars, embellished vehicles, and the history of customization.  It will, I believe, become the resource book for generations studying the movement, as it goes beyond the immediate Art Car world, and expands the examination to other cultures, horse-drawn vehicles, productmobiles, lowriders, and extreme car culture. 

 

AND, we're especially pleased to be a part of the project!  Not only did we contribute some images, but Ruthann gives the WLCoWSVoWLT a great long description, with a full-page photo (even though the image isn't that spectacular - our fault...), AND, super-special-extra-added bonus, we scored a spot in the Acknowledgements paragraph.   That's a first here, and we are honored and humbled.

 

Order one now!  Available through Amazon: 

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Show-Cars-Museum-Streets/dp/1933108177/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255622624&sr=8-4

 

 

Travel Writers LOVE LOVE LOVE Lucas.

 

Posted today on a Travel Industry site, an article from a travel writer that came through last week...

 

On Location Rural Kansas: One Motherquirky Little Town

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

 

Little Lucas has a big heart and big talent to go with it.  This teensy speck of a town has been a magnet for creative minds for many years, the result of which is a place where art is integrated into daily life.  Increasingly, Lucas is becoming a tourist magnet as well.  Do you have clients who enjoy going off the beaten path but want to stay on the road to cooldom?  Kansas is the new Meatpacking District; with scores of grand old buildings and warehouses being converted into artspace, the state is attracting alternative types and enjoying a cultural birth astonishing in its ability to work itself into a rural lifestyle. 

 

...

 

Erika Nelson, whose refreshing freespiritedness and positive thinking will have cynics won over in record time, is another Lucas resident who is putting the town on the map of art appreciators across the United States.  When not creating the world's largest souvenir travel plate, which just happens to welcome visitors to Lucas, Erika makes small statues of big statues.  More correctly, she makes the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things.  She travelled around the US for two years in her magical van, now decorated with myriad collections inside and out.  Erika's renown is set to grow substantially in 2010, when she will appear as an invited artist at the famous Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.

 

Read the rest online:  http://www.etravelblackboard.com/showarticle.asp?id=98170&nav=178

Big Art in a Small World

Art 21 - a great series from PBS, premiering now - See the official page

But, even better, the Salina Art Center has been showing them in the Art Center Cinema, enabling area artists a sneak peek, and discussions afterwards. During intermission, the coordinator for the Smoky Hills River Festival turns around and says: "Oh, did I tell you? During a Festival Planners Conference, one of the Pennsylvania coordinators says he saw the Bacolicious installation in a newsletter, and thought 'Well, EVERYONE loves BACON!', reads further, and thought 'Well, of COURSE it was in Salina!'" Small world - turns out, the PA Coordinator gets the WLT Newsletter! He's a Society for Commercial Archeology member, and saw the item on the 'recent doin's' section...

Art, bringing crazy people together since cave painting time.

Talkin' Voting Rights with the Travel Writer

Robert La Bau was sent out by the Kansas Department of Travel and Tourism to dig into the arts of Lucas.  We had a great time showing him what makes Lucas 'tick', sorta' tag-teaming him, as we are all still incredibly busy with an endless list of overlapping projects.  We'll see what comes out of his pen after his Lucas trip!

 

 

Belger Show "Rare Visions - Detour Art" voted Best of Kansas City

In the current issue of Pitch Magazine:

 

Los Angeles and New York — "the coasts" — are the heavy regional influencers in American culture, each city like an ironic air quotation mark mocking everything in between them. Here in "flyover country," by which we mean everywhere else, there are thousands of talented artists who are seldom recognized by the artistic establishment. So it's doubly ironic that when "outsider art" receives any kind of major attention, it's usually in those two coastal cities. But earlier this year, Kansas City's Belger Arts Center mounted a major exhibit of outsider art called Rare Visions–Detour Art, in conjunction with KCPT Channel 19's Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations, a documentary series on outsider art. It was a knockout. The exhibit included regional works by the Rev. Howard Finster, James Harold Jennings and Q.J. Stephenson, placing their works in a serious context in the austere Belger gallery, a space large enough to drive a truck through — which the exhibit also did, with Erika Nelson's decorated van containing the world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things. The exhibit's Devil Room pulled together regional depictions of Lucifer, a major mover and shaker in outsider art, tormenting the damned or tumescent, riding a tricycle.

 

http://www.pitch.com/bestof/2009/award/best-outsider-art-1157677/