An Artist's Life (part 3) by Alice Thorson

Credits

Recognition Overdue

A lasting summation of Leedy's life's work to date is a profusely illustrated new book on the artist by widely published crafts writer Matthew Kangas.

Jim Leedy: Artist Across Boundaries (University of Washington Press; softcover, $29.95) traces the artist's career from his early ceramics and paintings influenced by abstract expressionism to his monumental war works at Grand Arts. (Copies of the book are expected to be available locally before the end of the month.) Kangas' 179 pages encompass all facets of the artist's creative activity, including his ephemeral "Sky Art" demonstrations of the 1970s and '80s; the workshops and demonstrations he's held at schools around the world; and his public mural projects and other collaborative ventures in this country and abroad.

Before signing on in 1966 at Kansas City Art Institute, Leedy taught a long list of universities. Kangas acknowledges Leedy's reach and influence as a teacher, a career he began at Southern Illinois University in the late 1950s after earning master's degrees there from Michigan State University and studying art history at Columbia and Ohio State.

He was born in McRoberts, Kentucky -- an origin that prompted Kangas to want to find out, "How a boy who grew up near a clay pit and brick factory became so comfortable with clay he could make it do anything."

Kangas portrays Leedy as the "archetypal modernist who might now be seen as "postmodern," for his embrace of crafts, his use of fragments and unexpected materials and explicit social content.

Interviewed by phone from his home in Seattle, Kangas made no bones about his goal in writing the book.

"I wanted to get overdue national and international recognition for him beyond the Midwest, which has been very good to him," Kangas explained. "I think now people are going to realize he's more than a regional artist because his influence has extended beyond the Midwest, throughout postwar American ceramics."

Kangas asserts that it was Jim Leedy who influenced Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio and not, as many have thought, the other way around.

In Kangas' view, Leedy is "the most important artist to have lived in Kansas City since Thomas Hart Benton"

Both artists, he noted, figure importantly in Missouri art history as well as American art history. their outlooks, however, are very different.

"Leedy criticized American myths of nationhood," Kangas explained. "That's the total opposite of the flag waving Benton."

After spending five years immersed in researching Leedy's life and work, Kangas has concluded that his is a "dark vision."

"I had to come to terms with that in writing," Kangas said. "The thing about him -- there's always a glimmer of hope there somehow, whether it's bright color or humor.

"It's tempered but it's always dark."

Leedy, however, has a project in mind that would go far in altering this perception.

Harking to the sky art pennants that he stretched between downtown Kansas City buildings in the late 1970s, he envisions adding another soaring outdoor sculpture to the local skyline. The dream? "To sheath the Kansas City radio tower with stainless steel sheeting so it shines like the largest pyramid in the world."

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

© 2000 Kansas City Star, 9 January 2000, Section J, Pg. 1, 8.

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