Joyland’s Louie the Clown and new faculty works featured in Ulrich exhibitions

Louie the Clown — the life-size Joyland amusement park mannequin with urban legend status — is back for a rare public appearance.

Louie is part of an exhibition featuring items with personal and community connections, which will be on view at Wichita State’s Ulrich Museum of Art over the next several months.

The exhibition “With, Not For: Centering Community, Connection, and Identity” is one of four new exhibitions that opened at the Ulrich on Jan. 22. Another of the exhibitions is part of the Ulrich Museum’s longest-running exhibition series, featuring the works of WSU faculty members.

A free opening reception for all the exhibitions is happening from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29. The Ulrich Museum is free to visit from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with extended hours until 8 p.m. Thursdays.

Community collections

“We’re treating (Louie) like an art piece,” said Vivian Zavataro, the museum’s executive and creative director, who curated the “With, Not For” exhibition as part of a two-year effort to increase community engagement. For the current exhibition, items on loan from personal and other collections are displayed alongside pieces from the Ulrich collection.

Greg Kite, the head of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historic Preservation Alliance, calls Louie “a community treasure.” Louie has been part of the alliance’s collection since he was recovered more than a decade after his disappearance from Joyland, which closed in the mid-2000s.

When Kite saw the Ulrich’s call for items to include in an earlier exhibition called “Getting Personal,” he thought Louie would fit the category of having a connection to Wichita’s history, culture and community. Zavataro said the museum didn’t have the space to include Louie in that earlier exhibition. “With, Not For” combines several items from the “Getting Personal” exhibition alongside pieces from the Ulrich’s collection.

Of all the Wichita-related artifacts and memorabilia the alliance has in its collection, “people are more interested in the memorabilia from Joyland than anything else we have,” Kite said. “We knew this would pull on the heartstrings.”

Louie — a smiling paper-and-wood, partly mechanical mannequin that wears a polka-dotted suit and a cone hat — either frightened or amused visitors to Joyland, where he played a Wurlitzer Style 160 Military Style Organ called the Mammoth from the late 1940s until the park closed. After the park’s closure, Louie mysteriously disappeared and his whereabouts became the stuff of urban legend.

He was recovered by the Wichita Police Department in 2015, found in the home of a former park caretaker who’d been convicted of another crime. Since appearing at a WPD press conference announcing his recovery, Louie has been on display in limited runs at two other venues: a Wichita-area skating rink and the Twisted Oz Motorcycle Museum in Augusta.

While some of the Ulrich Museum staff had shared their less-than-pleasant recollections of Louie, Zavataro had a different reaction when Louie was uncrated for the exhibition.

“He’s not as creepy as you all told me,” she said. “He’s actually kind of cute.”

The “With, Not For” exhibition will be on view until June 3 in the Ulrich Museum’s second-floor major gallery.

A focus on faculty

The theme for the Ulrich’s faculty exhibition, formerly a biennial exhibition that is now held triennially, emphasizes the truth and honesty that can be reflected in art, said Jo Reinert in a recent phone interview. Reinert curated the exhibition before leaving the Ulrich Museum this past fall to become the arts, museums and public art manager for the city of Lancaster, California.

The exhibition’s title — “Symbols of Greatness: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — comes in part from a presidential executive order from March 2025, but rather than reflecting the “sanitized narratives of American exceptionalism” called for in the order, the artworks are meant to reflect diverse perspectives, Reinert said.

“Rather than accepting the framing of that executive order, this exhibition asks the more difficult question of what if greatness isn’t about control and erasure and mythmaking, but what if it’s about the truth?” Reinert said. “And that’s what art does. It tells the truth. … The exhibition is saying that that’s not a threat to America, that’s not a threat to national history, but it’s an essential part of the human experience and to our national experience.”

About 20 works created by 13 Wichita State faculty members are in the exhibition.

Ted Adler, a professor of ceramic media, has two pieces on display. Fired in a soda kiln at 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit, the works feature variegated dark charcoal gray surfaces with warmer, underlying hues of orange and yellow to illustrate the themes of darkness and resilience.

Inspired by Leonard Cohen’s song, “Darkness,” Adler titled the works “Chasing Darkness.” The fissures and underlying hues can be seen as a reference to another Cohen lyric, “there is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in,” from his 1992 song, “Anthem.”

Robert Bubp, who has taught painting and drawing at WSU since 2002, also has two works in the exhibition. His multimedia pieces are called “Domestic Anxiety Study #1” and “Domestic Anxiety Study #2” and like much of his other works, they reflect multiple layers of both construction and meaning.

His pieces incorporate items that he’s gathered from his home, yard and studio to reflect aspects of his home life, such as his daily coffee and frequent walks with his dogs, as well as Internet-sourced news images and remnants of political yard signs.

“‘Domestic’ now means not just my personal domicile but also refers to this country and what it is and stands for,” wrote Bubp in his artist statement.

Painter Tim Stone, who features scenes of nature in his works, has a piece called “Flood Plain” in the show. Depicting a scene of flooding water, the 3 1/2-by-7-foot artwork reflects the environmental concerns of climate change and natural disasters.

“Symbols of Greatness” will be on view through June 13.

Two other exhibitions will also open at the Ulrich Museum this month.

“Taiomah Rutledge: Origins/Evolutions” features new works by Rutledge, a member of the Ojibwe, Meskwaki and Dakota nations; it’s the first exhibition in a new series called In Place that will feature works by Wichita-based artists. It will be on view through July 25.

The exhibition “Anne Samat: Avatars” will feature elaborate totem-like structures by the Malaysian artist Samat. It will be on view through May 30.

Opening reception for Ulrich Museum’s spring exhibitions

When: 5:30-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29

Where: Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State University campus, near 17th and Fairmount

Admission: Free. The exhibitions can also be seen for free during the Ulrich Museum’s regular hours of 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with extended hours until 8 p.m. Thursdays.

More info: 316-978-3662, ulrich.wichita.edu

This story was originally published January 25, 2026 at 5:45 AM.