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Written by Knight Ridder
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Wednesday, 21 June 2006 |
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LUCAS, KAN.— Dogs dawdled on main street, and most of the 450 residents were somewhere else, making Lucas seem like any other sleepy town on the Kansas prairie. Until you looked a little closer.
Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, a devil and angel, and serpents were among the 150 or so concrete sculptures surrounding one house that proclaimed itself the “Garden of Eden.”
Behind another was a rock garden that recreated Mount Rushmore. Peek inside and every wall of the otherwise empty cottage was filled with hanging artworks made from Barbie dolls and computer boards.
In a back yard, a van filled with miniature tourist attractions billed itself as the “World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum.” Inside a downtown gallery, the showroom included a full-sized auto made entirely of pull-tabs salvaged from aluminum cans. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle next to it also was fashioned from pull-tabs — 179,200 of them.
What’s going on here? Wendell Cowan volunteered a tour and explanation, starting at the Grassroots Art Center, the gallery where the car and motorcycle were parked.
“People who do grass-roots art are either retired, or injured, and have nothing else to do, so they start a hobby of making things from trash,” said Cowan, a retired teacher who helps out at the center.
The town of Lucas, he said, is the center of this movement in Kansas because of four artists who lived there, or close by, and left a legacy of their work behind. They were:
- Samuel Perry Dinsmoor, who begin building the Garden of Eden and Cabin Home in 1907 at age 64.
- Florence Deeble, a schoolteacher who liked the mountains and decided to recreate them of rock and colored concrete in the garden behind her home.
- Inez Marshall, who began carving sculptures from blocks of limestone while recovering from a back injury suffered in a trucking accident in her late 20s.
- Ed Root, who was unable to farm after an auto accident in 1937, began assembling concrete sculptures embedded with bits of glass and other items he found.
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