Funny Faces of Public Art in Eureka Springs Arkansas

Featured artist, John Rankine, chats about MUGS, a fun outdoor photography exhibition he worked on for Creative Energy and the 2013 May Festival of the Arts in Eureka Springs.
Rankine created the exhibition with Global Image Creation’s CEO and Creative Director Jeremy Mason McGraw. For the project, Rankine photographed 130 resident creatives pulling their silliest faces. He, McGraw, and a group of volunteers wallpapered the portraits to the exteriors of buildings throughout Eureka Springs’ historic downtown.
The portraits went up on May 1. Three weeks later Rankine and McGraw hosted a graffiti event and invited the public to “enhance” the portraits with magic markers.
“You’re never going to be short of characters in Eureka Springs,” says John Rankine, which this exhibition certainly proved.

Hotel Room Art, Chicago - By Jeremy Mason McGraw

Chicago Hotel Room Art

There have been countless words, brushstrokes, and exposures dedicated to capturing the experience of travel in hotel room art. The foreign people, and food, and language. The place, the history, and the politics. Attempts to understand a world that’s unfamiliar, to understand ourselves better, and to discover what divides us and what is universal. However, in all the novels and paintings and exquisite photographs there is one element of travel that is often overlooked: the hotel.

Ghost Rider, Light Painting Photography from Public Art Project Electric Vision - Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Electric Vision – Light Painting Photography of Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Art and business are often seen as mutually exclusive. Our perception of art is that it is driven by passion, muse, and creativity. It is Vincent Van Gogh, working despite being ridiculed, and only celebrated posthumously. It is Frida Kahlo, driven to create self portraits in a time that celebrated muralists, overshadowed by her husband her entire career. Business, on the other hand, is perceived as professional, disciplined, logical. It is data and spreadsheets and budgets. These two worlds often seem unbridgeable, however, the gap between art and business is not as fundamental as our stereotypes lead us to believe. This understanding led us to create Electric Vision, a light painting photography public art project in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.