Two Many Rainbows
In a town renowned for being an arts community, with such a long and wonderful tradition of public art, expectations are anticipated to be rather high. Even the installations of guerrilla art are of a quality that can be remarked on by the most stoic critics as a well-done piece that enhances our community.
The Rainbow Stairs, a beautiful well-worn mural that cascades from Center Street down to Main Street, is a public work that thousands of tourists pose on. It has become a de facto point of navigation for locals when giving tourists directions.
I point this out to highlight the new public art mural on the steps across from Basin Park. Up until now, they have been a patch of grey industrial concrete sidewalk. The only attractive or charming thing about it was the function of connecting Main to Spring Street directly across from the park and the two store fronts on its progress.
These steps have been painted with garish stripes of color that could be easily mistaken by visitors for the beloved mural that has, up until now, been the Rainbow Stairs. We already have a rainbow stairway.
Eureka Springs, can’t we do better than this?
The city arts council put out a request – through channels – for an artist to paint the steps with a mural. I do not wish in any way to disparage the artists that answered this call or the artist who won the city contract.
I would like to ask how many artists knew about the project to begin with? There are a vast number of artists that live here; aspiring, successful, and retired artists, all of whom deeply love the art community of our city. They are one of the reasons why this town is so attractive. We have two natural resources here, raw creativity and a passion for the arts. And yet it seems as though the city arts council never manages to tap into those resources. As a result, we are continually disappointed by their half-hearted attempts at engaging that portion of our community.
From a few brief questions with the workers painting the steps: they confessed, “This is all it’s going to be, as far as we know.” If it turns out that in the future there will be more than just these stripes of purple, blue, green, orange, yellow, and red, wonderful, let’s see it. However, I fear that this is too much to hope for.
There are other problems with this project that are affecting local businesses, and safety concerns have been pointed out. The steps are already rather narrow and must be taken with caution at the best of times; what with the new dazzling array of intense colors and the inadvertent pattern they create, it will certainly cause further hazards.
There is nothing wrong with rainbows. Nothing at all. I personally love the warmth of the representation of our community. I do not believe there is another small town in America with more Pride or acceptance than ours. However, in such a creative, LGBT community, I would have hoped that something, anything, could have been proposed and accepted other than a simplistic rainbow.
Noah Morris