Wichita creatives show that if you can’t see the art, you might as well be the art
Wichitans have had a lot of down time lately.
But some of the artsy among them have used that time in the pursuit of art — or rather in the pursuit of replicating art.
Inspired by a #MuseumFromHome challenge put out at the end of March by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which asked people to recreate favorite works of art using objects they could find around the house, Wichitans have been bringing works by Vermeer, Kahlo and Michelangelo to life.
The results are rather remarkable, created in quarantines using objects like toilet plungers, just-purchased herbs, Christmas decorations and clothes dug out of from the back of the closet.
The Wichita Art Museum, which has been closed since mid-March, challenged people in the beginning of April via social media to try it at home and to base their recreations on pieces from the museum’s permanent collection.
They’ve been posting the results on Facebook periodically ever since. Many of the people who participated were museum staff members and docents.
Among them was docent Sue Poston, who recreated Walt Kuhn’s “Girl in Shako” using her grown daughter Elise as a model and co-collaborator.
Elise, a Brooklyn resident working remotely from her parents’ Wichita home for the last several weeks, posed as the subject of the 1930 painting, which features a female stage performer in bright makeup. They combined a lampshade and a WSU baseball cap to recreate the shako and used Christmas decorations to replicate her coat.
The project was a fun mother/daughter bonding experience, Poston said, and it gave her a new perspective on the painting, which hangs in the museum beside another Kuhn piece called “Acrobat in White and Silver.”
“I never really was that crazy about them before, either one of them,” Poston said. “Now, I’m going to feel totally different.”
Another group that took up the challenge was Professor Shannon Johnston’s Art Appreciation students at Newman University.
Johnston asked her 57 students, all of whom were taking classes online after school was closed for the semester, to tackle the project, and she also got some quality results.
One student sent in a rather spot-on replica of “Girl With A Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer. Another recreated a piece of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” where God and Adam touch fingers. As an added touch, and to reflect the times, the hands in the replica photo are both covered with plastic gloves.
Johnston said she was impressed with the efforts from her students, and she think they got something out of it.
“I’ve been giving them projects along the way to understand how artists do what they do,” she said. “This gives them a better understanding and gives them ownership of their own creativity.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
.jpg)