Photo by Mars Hall

Alice Guffey Miller

   Recently, the Arkansas Arts Council's judges gave her a 2004 Special Recognition Award for Arts in Education.

   According to the brochure for the 2004 Governor's Arts Awards and Individual Artist Fellowship Awards Ceremony and Luncheon, Alice Guffey Miller's contribution to the Arkansas art scene includes over 20 years of dedication to empowering communities through art, obtaining grants for student and community art projects, collaborating with students of all ages and adults with disabilities to create historical parades and public art projects, and remaining active at the community, regional and statewide levels to bring art experiences to students and community members of all ages.

   In other words, the Monticello resident has been there, done that.

   "She's one of the great unsung art geniuses of our time," says poet laureate Robert "red hawk" Moore, who nominated Miller for the award. "She is a genius at creating art out of recycled materials. I wanted to see that she got appropriate credit for her work with kids and what she has done for art in this state."

   According to husband Mars Hall, who often collaborates with his wife on installations, Miller never fit in the categories reserved for individual artist awards though she had been nominated several times.

   "A lot of people in Arkansas think of Alice working with children, but she also works with the community in several ways: senior citizens, disabled, all the people in the community," Hall says. "She's definitely a natural resource for the state of Arkansas."

Bouree Baroque

Artist in Education

   At one time, Miller wanted to paint pictures. Partly due to the expense of painting and partly due to her natural talent with three dimensions, Miller turned to sculpting.

   "I have to and I want to and I love to (make art)," she says. "It makes me happy. I am so lucky because I love what I do, which makes me love my life. I am forever grateful about this wonderful life I've been able to lead."

   Miller began making a living at art in 1984 by working with the Arkansas Arts Council's "Arts in Education" program. An art teacher from Pottsville Elementary saw Miller's stone sketches, where she turned native river rock into "what it showed me."

   "It's like the idea of looking into the clouds. You look into the clouds and see things," she says. "(Ideas) just come to me from everything around me. For instance, the wood tells you what to do with it. My materials are my inspiration in so many ways and just the whole world around me."

   The teacher hired her to work with school children making a rock garden. Her first experience with "all these little hands and mine" led to a lifetime of collaboration with students in elementary schools, high schools and college, working on playground sculptures, murals, festive and fanciful mobiles, fantasy gardens and simulated stained glass that usually remained with the school for years to come.

   "I'm not an educator, but I make art," Miller claims. "I got the kids to use their imagination and my imagination."

   Their imaginations combined make memorable art installations, as anyone around Waldron (in Northwest Arkansas) would tell you. Miller combined a National Endowment Regional Artistic Project grant with an Arkansas Artist in Education grant to make a 75-foot dragon to float on Truman-Baker Lake near the park once voted most photogenic park in the United States.

Photo by Alice Guffey Miller

Pop the Magic Dragon

   Miller worked with 600 volunteers from the Waldron school district to construct "POP the Magic Dragon," and hired playwright Ray Coleman of Ft. Smith to provide a performance coinciding with the dragon's appearance.

   Her plans nearly derailed when she had to gain permission from the state Highway Department to float the dragon on the lake at a highway rest stop outside Waldron. According to insurance companies, the installation made an "attractive nuisance" to drivers on U.S. Highway 71.

   "I had to get $1.5 million in liability just to be able to float it (for six months)," Miller says. "All the kids wanted to do it and we did it."

   According to Miller's contact information on the Arkansas Arts Council's Web site, "Alice creates grand scale international 'Involvement Sculptures' always emphasizing environmental awareness and community creativity." She uses a variety of recyclable materials in her work. "POP the Magic Dragon" contained 2,000 green plastic (Sprite and 7-Up) bottles, inner tubes, tires, styrofoam, wire and rebar.

   Sometimes Miller recycles natural rather than man-made materials. In 1987, she turned the trunk of a dead pin oak tree at Little Rock's Mac Arthur Park into the head of a 150-foot sculpted dragon with help from six teen-agers from the Little Rock Job Corps Center. Tree limbs provided legs and a wood frame covered with pine slabs made the body for "Mac Arthur's Myth." She re-used some of the dragon bones in a floating gazebo, but notes that not all of her art lasts forever.

Photo by Ron Sitton

TinFinned Fable Fish

   "I do make a lot of stuff that I burn up just for the event," Miller says. "Doing things that aren't permanent is fun. The pressure's off. It just makes it a lot more fun."

   Not only does Miller use recycled materials, she recycles the installations in some instances. Miller turned the tail of "POP the Magic Dragon" into "The TinFinned Fable Fish" for the Army Corps of Engineers' 25th anniversary celebration of the McClellan Kerr Waterway (lock and dam) system on the Arkansas River.

   Miller made the fish's scales from 300 flattened No. 10 tin cans (recycled through Monticello area schools), fins from a fallen shed's corrugated tin roofing, eyes from lawn-mower tires and lips from blown-out inner tubes. It took her and an apprentice approximately 600 total hours to build the fish.

   "Tall tales from a fish's mouth" used the fish as a backdrop at Riverfest in 1996 near a 100-foot mural of "The Arkansas River Riddle," which asked kids to paint what swims in, floats on or washes down the Arkansas River. However, administrators sidetracked a planned continuance of the performance.

   "The flotilla committee decided to buy everybody a leather jacket instead of funding students who'd done the research on fables," Hall says. "They were going to give a performance at each stop on the river where the fish appeared and all the people in their yachts. That pissed me off."

   More recently, Miller worked over two years with the University of Arkansas at Monticello community on the installation "Facing Reflections," which features 75 direct face casts and about 50 hand casts of students, staff and administrators, including new Chancellor Jack Lassiter. The work hangs in a stairwell of the Memorial Classroom Building on the UAM campus.

Photo by Ron Sitton

Facing Reflections

   Miller's work also includes the Mississippi River mural "Looking Along Rivers" in Little Rock's Forest Park to honor the Louisiana Purchase for Arkansas' Heritage Month, as well as former works at Wildwood Park, the Children's Museum of Arkansas, the Little Rock Zoo, Fayetteville's Walton Arts Center, Hot Spring's Celebration of the Arts, North Little Rock's William F. Laman Public Library, and Arkansas schools including Otter Creek, Wrightsville, Cabot and Searcy among others.

   "Some of the kids who worked with me are now adults," Miller says. "In Hatfield, they told me how much they loved building (her first playground sculpture) and how sad they were that it had to be removed. They had taken their kids to play on it. Once at Beans & Grains in Little Rock, and the cashier stopped me and said, 'Wow! Were you that artist at Booker Arts Magnet school?' Here they were in college and they remembered me from fourth grade."

Miller and Mars Hall

Community artist

   While Miller claims her favorite art piece is the "one I just finished," she acknowledges that her biggest challenge came from working in May 2000 on Monticello's Rough and Ready Days, the annual celebration of the historical origins of Monticello's original name. Working around the Arkansas Heritage Month theme "Homeward Bound: A Migration Story" for the millennium celebration, Miller conceived "The People's Parade," which involved nearly 300 Monticellonians, including children from local grade schools and the Boys & Girls Club, and adults from Our Way, a thrift shop run by special needs adults.

   "I really enjoy working with the special needs kids and adults that have mental and physical problems," Miller said. "They are so easily pleased, which is so refreshing. Overall I find them much happier than the regular population. I like them a lot. I relate to them and they seem to relate to me. We get along swell."

   Coca-Cola provided a warehouse where volunteers could work on the community project. A documentary film of "The People's Parade" by Randocrates details the experience. The experience made a big impression on red hawk.

   "The people's parade is my favorite," Moore said. "It was great fun. It was educational. My wife, Chandrika Taylor, did the costuming. She and Alice work together on most of their projects. They're a great team."

   Miller's most recent community project coincided with the 2004 Rough-and-Ready Days. Funded by a grant for Arkansas Heritage Month and adhering to the theme of "Find it on Main Street," the project ended with a permanent mural in Monticello's McCloy Park.

   Husband Mars Hall's UAM performance study class researched buildings and characters associated with Monticello's Main Street at the turn of the 20th century. Miller worked with volunteers from the Other Way, the Drew County Developmental Disabilities Council, the Boys & Girls Club, and UAM art students on drawing buildings from old photographs from Main Street.

   "They kept drawing the Old Courthouse, which was the most spectacular building on Main Street," Miller says, noting that helped in the decision to use the courthouse for a mural. "All the windows and some of the brick work became self-portraits of the Boys and Girls Club members and the Other Way adults, while the brickwork had self-portraits of (UAM art instructor) Tom (Richard's) and Mars' students."

   Hall's students researched characters vital to Main Street Monticello when the courthouse stood. They then wrote a script from the character's viewpoints to perform. The finale occurred in front of the mural, which remains a permanent reminder of the Heritage project. That's not all that remains.

BugZilla

   "We put a time capsule with a copy of that week's newspaper, a Bible and a bottle of whiskey, which was also in the original time capsule from the city (courthouse in 1870)," Hall said.

International artist

   Hall’s favorite collaborative installation with Miller also involved a time capsule. In 1945, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin decided the fate of the defeated nation of Germany at Pottsdam. On the 50th anniversary of Pottsdam Agreement in 1995, world artists decided what to do with Pottsdam following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

   Hall composed a community poem after students from France, Belgium and Poland went to coffeehouses to get people to make or draw what they'd like to see happen to Pottsdam over the next 50 years. The newspaper in Pottsdam published excerpts of the poem every week.

   Miller helped build a Water Hen, which was honored by a reading of the community poem when it launched. A river tour featured the Water Hen floating down the river with bare-breasted German girls in front. On its return to Pottsdam, a transvestite who had taken the name of Victor-Victoria came out of the Water Hen with an egg that had the community poem in it.

   "We presented it to the Burgermeister with a time capsule buried in a garden to be unearthed in 50 years to see if they'd done what they wanted to do with their city," Hall said.

Thank the Phone Fairies

"When I call cross state to Mimosa Manor from Monticello there's never a toll. Phone fairies are handling our affair, flying calls between the cracks in Ma Bell. And I call early every morning, every day all year. And this morning before first light I've watched a sugar cookie moon climb down out of a huge water oak. Am I'm obsessed with hanging that moon in your ear. I hold the receiver like you hand play music in your palm. doot, do, dootle, oot, doodle, oot, doot, oodle, dooot, oot, do I place your hand against my face ready to hear your "good morning" energy. Dead, a plastic phone again -- 200 miles of wire goes nowhere. Receiver only clicks back at my tap ta tap tap. Four hours later you awaken, Slobber Kitty beside you, wet spot on the pillow, and you tell me how your late night work last night lasted all night and how considerate I am for not calling early like I usually do." Hall sent Miller poems like this one about telephones, though she had not had a phone line in 18 years.

Snail Mail

   Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., Miller came to Arkansas as a self-proclaimed "hippie back to the land-er" after traveling through Louisiana and Mexico. The cheap prices for land lured her to Nella Valley in Scott County, where she lived for 23 years at "Mimosa Manner."

   "I lived eight miles back a dirt road, 16 miles to the closest phone and 25 miles to town," she boasts. "I lost my horse when he died at 28, it occurred to me that I'd been with him longer than any other person. My city life is very minimal compared to the more rural life, which I choose and knew from a young age that I didn't want to live in the city."

   It sounds like Miller never planned to leave, but "fate' planned otherwise. When Mars Hall first moved from Minnesota to Southeast Arkansas, he visited the Arts and Science Center in Pine Bluff where he saw Miller's artwork.

   "Looking at the stuff I thought she was African American or Native American," Hall says. "It was totally a surprise that she's from Pittsburgh."

   Hall wrote a letter, but Miller did not immediately receive it as she was working with street kids in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. When she returned, they wrote letters back and forth for three months -- all the while never having actually laid eyes on each other or spoken on the phone. They exchanged photographs, interests and sketches.

   The letters finally led to their first encounter. Hall wanted Miller to go with him to Florida over Spring Break. Miller thought it best if they met first, so they agreed on meeting in Hot Springs at the top of the tower.

   "I really didn't know about 'Sleepless in Seattle,'" Miller says of the famous scene in the Tom Hanks movie. "(The tower)'s where we met. We looked into each other's eyes and cried."

   Hall says he knew how he felt before ever actually meeting Miller.

   "I probably fell in love with her through the mail rather than any physical contact," he says.

Igniting Firey

   They took a trip to St. Georges Island on the Gulf Coast on their second date over Spring Break, and stopped at the Chameleon Motel in Georgia. Hall decided to ask her to take another trip, but Miller thought maybe they were moving too quick. Hall pulled out a deck of Stargate cards, and the Wheel card showed when they threw them.

   "(The Wheel) came up as our destiny," Hall says. "I interpreted that we should go west for the summer and she went with it."

   The two traveled cross-country to Los Angeles, where they met Miller's mother and sister and some extended family. They had planned to part ways there as she was headed to an international gathering of celebration artists in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Hall was headed to a critical thinking conference in San Francisco.

   "But I decided to screw the critical thinking conference," Hall says. "I was going to the celebration conference. And my life has never been the same."

   The decision led to their first collaboration piece on the beach of Point Roberts on the international border between Washington and British Columbia. With the help of nearly 15 people, they picked up drift logs and sat them roots-up, trunk-down. Hall got people to name the piece e.g. Cata-"log" Ranch, Driftwood Gardens, Dia-"logs" – on the seawall with charcoal and colored chalk. People from the celebration conference used the area for different things, including dances from New York performers, a night concert from an acappella choir, and fire dancing.

Photo by Ron Sitton

Beware: Art Enlightens

Tabernacle of the Tall Timbers

   While they planned to wait to get married until they found "the right place for my married-into family of Alice and her animal-children," they decided to marry and make the commute. But the day after they married, they found Rising Oaks -- 35 acres of wooded land sitting off the main highway through Monticello. The land, formerly known as Annswood and before that the Fairgrounds, provided plenty of room for Miller's horses and other animals -- and her art.

   "It was very scary moving to town, but with this it was doable," Miller says. "One of the biggest things is that we could have pizza delivered. But Pizza Hut wouldn't deliver because they were the only one in town. ... (Mars) found me, because I'd still be out in the woods somewhere."

   St. Louis may have Laumeier Park, but Monticello may one day boast of its own sculpture park at Rising Oaks. Driving up to the gate, the first thing you notice is a sign reminding you to shut the gate after you enter for the horses' safety. A blue mobile catches the eye with the slogan "Beware Art" and a creature's face proclaiming "Beware: Art Enlightens." Pulling up the driveway a bit further, a grasshopper the size of a compact car looks toward the house. Upon closer inspection of the "River Hopper," you would notice the eyes made of tires and wings made of metal and plastic.

   In the woods on the right, an 18 X 12 X 5 feet composition of treated trees, tires and inner tubes may be better known as "Tireless the Terrific and the Talented Tia Maria Tubeless," which looks like a ballerina on top of a horse. The sculpture debuted at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville on the 1990-1991 sculpture tour, and could be seen at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia from 1997-1998.

Tireless the Terrific and the Talented Tia Maria Tubeless

   Pulling up to the handicapped-accessible house, you may see the white GMC van covered with art and the title, "Imaginations at Large." Miller's company is ARTventures International and its slogan is "Make Art, Not Trouble." Sitting behind the house and flanked by two 3-foot statues of broken glass, pots, plates and rocks in concrete, Miller's "studiagio" resembles a barn converted into a prism of light.

   At the moment, Miller and Aaron Cronshey work on the "orifice," a studio and writing space jutting out from the back of the house and named for a hole in the roof. The framing for the new space came from maybe 10 trees off the couple's land.

   "We hired a Monticello company to come in and cut the lumber and turn it into 'real' 2X6 and 2X4," Miller says. "Mark and Kim Bowden have a family operation and pulled their portable sawmill in here."

   Miller says plans call for a covered walkway between the two work spaces, and proudly points out wood recycled from an old carport that's been sanded and turned into some of the studio's wall, as well as some of the new carport. Just beside the "studiagio" behind the house sits the Tin Finned Fable Fish, now retired from a stint at the Little Rock Zoo following renovation there. In a sense, it's been recycled again.

   "I really like to recycle stuff," Miller says. "I love bottles -- plastic and glass."

   To keep up with her different media, she sorts things by category (e.g. rocks, broken dishes, cups and bottles by color) in the studiagio and in the barn/stable behind it. Between the two sits Miller's "biggest sandbox ever," where she mixes glass in combination with steel and cement for castings that adorn trees or act as cast windows.

   The sandbox sits under a gigantic spider hanging from the limbs of an oak tree. Some of the trees on the property would make Southerners rethink their definition of "old growth" forests in the South, while the property hosts approximately 30 sculptures, murals and installations.

Photo by Ron Sitton

Rising Oaks, Monticello, Ark.

   Hall says Paul Becker of the UAM Music Department wants to be the curator and make it into a museum one day. Just from the items already available, some of the installations might include pieces from:

• Bubble-ina, which used to sit atop the bubble machine at the Arkansas Children's Museum
• Sets from a "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"
• Sets from the "Man of LaMancha"
• The Magic Bus from the set of "Help, Help the Globolinks"
• Dragon Bones from "Mac Arthur's Myth"

   "It is for us but as for opening it to the public, Mars is not really open to that idea," Miller says. "Maybe at one point when we're dead or something. This place is a project. It's a fun project that won't stop. More and more I want to do this. Less and less I go out. I love it that right here I have all my needs."

   While she does not count the Internet among those needs, she takes phone calls at (870) 367-1036 or letters at 594 West Conrad Ave., Monticello, Ark. 71655.

Satisfaction in recognition    Miller did not expect to receive the 2004 Governor's Arts Award.

   "I'm shocked that I got it, but I did," she said. "Hopefully, (the award) helps (the public) to understand that what I do really is art and to have respect for artists in general. ... The award shows me somebody really does see this is worth something, not just me."

Photo by Ron Sitton

River Hopper

   Miller said the recognition helps as artists, in general, are seldom recognized for their work. While the students she works with always enjoy the process and product, some administrators leave her exasperated as they may not truly appreciate the accomplishment of a public art piece due to their preoccupation with bigger things.

   "You have to work really hard with hundreds of children and you're expected to work with hundreds of people," Miller said. "I've come to expect the normalcy of people not getting it. ... I've had some bad experiences that make me say I don't want to do public sculpture due to the people in power of the project not understanding than an artist is sensitive. They just don't get it. They can be very unkind and disrespectful."

   Miller notes that sometimes sponsors do not understand the ownership she has in the piece. Even though she may not be doing all of the physical work, she conceived the ideas behind the projects and wishes administrators would understanding that and not think they can take over and finish a project without her.

   "They should respect how much I have into it," she said. "It's my whole life at the time, my whole life as I'm making it. I'm putting everything I can into a project and I'd like people to understand that."

   A bad experience at a public art project nearly led Miller to quit sharing her life with the public, but contact with one of her former co-conspirator's renewed her enthusiasm.

   "I had a kid call from California who had worked with me on the dragon in MacArthur Park," she says. "Abe, the kid in California, worked on that with me after he'd get out of school at Rightsell Elementary. He'd come everyday after school. .... He called out of the blue and said how much that time meant to him. He called right when I needed that boost."

   According to red hawk, Miller gives art a boost by "turning on" school children to the discipline through hands-on projects that display a "play" spirit and child-like quality that is both joyful and humorous.

   "She's a magician with kids," Moore said. "Great talent without a great heart isn't worth a damn thing. Great talent with great heart can help humanity. It's an unbeatable combination. It's rare. With that combination of great talent and great heart, it can transform people inside. Nothing is more important than awakening hearts of human beings.

   "Every little thing that turns children on to their artistic talents is a benefit to all mankind. Her genius is aimed at changing the world through art ... through art, one person at a time, she's making this a better world."

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