Loving Local Artists: Marvin Finn

On January 29, 2007, Marvin Finn died at the age of 89 in Louisville, Kentucky. I have never heard of Finn before. A notice came to me via Google's daily alert. His obituary included one "public art" project made during his 86th year.

In the Courier-Journal, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson praised Finn's legacy, calling him "one of Louisville's greatest folk artists."

I love this statement. Not America's, not Kentucky's, not African-American, but Louisville's. In many ways, our art and design bureaucracies have turned away from local pride to broader comparisons.

The "CONTINUED READING" contains the details on Finn and the project, but the mandatory front-loaded Blog concern is that local talent that has been dismissed by the nationalism of public art administration. How many times have I heard that the local artists don't have the experience? The assumption is that the artists can't achieve success, but the truth is that the arts leadership cannot achieve success.

Except in situations when a jurisdiction needs some strange particular skill, local artists are always capable of adorning public space and structures. It is just that the administrators and arts supporters want to be judged by national standards. They institutionalize those objectives through required methods to deliver new public art. Skills in navigating design and construction administration and skills in responding to community needs have become prerequisites.

As the Queensland (Australia) Art Built-In Programs have proven, these attributes can be achieved by other professionals assisting the artists. But frequently these required skills permit the administration to comfortably ignore local talent and to satisfy an objective of national or international participation.

As 2006 protests in Kansas City and elsewhere have shown, the local artists are forced into a position of asking for training to come up to national standards. The artists should require that the programs be re-conceptualized for the talents of local artists with exceptions granted for projects where outside artists seem like a good idea.

Here is where Marvin Finn is so important. The citizens of Louisville reconceived both their method of selecting public artworks and their method of fabricating artworks to have a public artwork by a local artist. All parts of the processes where transformed to bring Finn's vision into the public realm. Every agency should ask itself how it could change such that the Finn's are the norm and the pride, not the exception.

Thanks to Kelly Haferman photos, John Nation and Michael Kimmel of Waterfront Development Corp.