Marking the Past/Shaping the Present: The Art of Willis "Bing" Davis (at DAI)

I want to thank Mary McCarty for her DDN column of Sunday, January 16. She made note of something we all do in regards to the arts. We talk and talk and talk about how we need to go more, see more, do more, and do it all more often, and then one day, when we do go, it’s gone, and just like the song, we realize we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.

That’s what could happen to our arts – all of them – if we don’t change our attitudes.

Back in the early 80s, my husband and I lived in the Washington DC area, a region rich with art – the many museums of the Smithsonian, the Phillips Collection, the galleries, free stuff on the Mall, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Gallery – and to this day I regret not going more often to these wonderful places while I lived so close and it was so easy. Some of them I never got to (shame on you Marsha!). I had the same problem we all have in our lives; I had a finite number of hours in a day, a week, a month, and I still had to do laundry, run errands, clean the house, go to work, so how could I possibly set aside those “have tos” for an “I‘d really like to”?

Because, as Mary so rightly points out, those “like tos” have to become “must dos” or those things in life that enrich us will disappear. Some already have, sadly. It’s tough to change our actions; it’s a decision to be intentional; to set time aside to nurture ourselves. And, as we all know, the laundry still has to get done.

How do we do it? Am I making a case for a 12 step program in saving the arts? Do we need to form a support group of arts lovers who drag us to the museum, to the theatre, to those wonderful galleries full of interesting, thought-provoking local art?

I don’t think so. But I do think it’s time to make a promise: to honor that part of us that gains health and nourishment from creation, visual thought, and imagination. Otherwise we will surely starve.
When you go to the Dayton Art Institute: Enjoy the permanent collection, then visit these: