This Wichita artist often gets international attention. Here’s how he does it

Christopher Gulick’s passport has quite a few stamps.

Gulick, who has been a mainstay in Wichita’s art scene for decades, has shown his kinetic mobile sculptures in places as far-off as Berlin, Germany and Sydney, Australia.

Fresh from that exhibition in Sydney late last year, Gulick is now busily preparing to open “New Projection-Relief Works” at Reuben Saunders Gallery this Final Friday.

Some of his sculptures – made entirely of wires/pipes/scrap metal and other found objects – are mounted onto wall panels and others hang from the ceiling in the gallery. A light breeze is enough to blow any of them around, creating an array of dancing shadows on the wall.

His sculptures are non-objective minimalism – there’s no fancy abstract message he’s trying to convey through the works, generally.

In a recent interview, he laughed at the mere suggestion of describing his work in “art speak.”

“This is the 5-year-old kid in me scribbing on Mom’s walls and ... 55 years later building something out of it,” Gulick said. “These are my version of toys. All my life I’ve been working on something that was essentially a toy.”

His work has led him places that are certainly no joke, however.

Gulick started doing art shows around Wichita in the 1990s, as part of the Famous Dead Artists collective – a group that was instrumental in pushing the Final Friday concept in Wichita.

He landed his first out-of-town show in 2004, in a gallery in Kansas City’s east Crossroads district. Later that year, he received a solicitation from a gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Now he regularly applies for – and lands – showings around the U.S. and internationally.

How does he do it?

By saying yes to opportunities as they arise, he said.

“I’m not that special,” he said. “You just have to jump through that fire. That’s the only difference between me and anbody else. That’s all I did – just go do it.”

His most recent trip to Sydney, Australia introduced him to more than 150 artists from that city, he said – one of whom he is collaborating with to apply for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field show in Japan later this year.

In Wichita, you can see his work in the lobby of the Kansas Leadership Center, 325 E. Douglas. The center commissioned a 8-by-16-foot aluminum mobile from Gulick in 2013.

The works in “New Projection-Relief Works” were created as part of Reuben Saunders Gallery’s artist-in-residency program last August.

The Final Friday opening will be from 5:30-9 p.m. Friday. Reuben Saunders Gallery is at 3215 E. Douglas.

This story was originally published January 24, 2018 at 5:04 PM with the headline "This Wichita artist often gets international attention. Here’s how he does it."