An Artist's Life (part 1) by Alice Thorson

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The influential Kansas City artist and teacher, best known for his innovative and expressionist ceramics works, has long kept his war memories to himself.

"I've always had this thing that came out of my experiences in Korea," the artist related in a recent interview. "It was private."

Three years ago Leedy visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

"I came out of there crying," he said. "I thought, 'I have to do something with this'."

He began thinking about a body of work that would express his feelings about war.

A little more than a year ago, Leedy took a bad fall that landed him in the hospital for several months. War-related images surfaced in the book of "hospital drawings" he produced during that period.

Back on his feet, he continued to explore the theme in earnest on a large scale. Last Friday Leedy bared his soul and conscience about evils of war in an exhibit of monumental sculpture and room-scaled installations at Grand Arts. The show, nearly three years in the making, carries the title "The Earth Lies Screaming."

"This show's all about war," Leedy remarked in an interview last fall at Grand Arts, where a team of assistants working from a medical instruction skeleton, was helping him make casts of human bones that figure repeatedly in the new works.

Beside him stood a 9-foot-tall finished piece, "Atomic Skull," amid boxes piled with femurs and fibulae, vertebrae and ribs. Shaped like a mushroom cloud and covered with muddy casts of human skulls and bones, the grim effigy looked as if it had recently been excavated. Leedy dirtied its surface to achieve just this effect, using a mixture of potting soil and glue that he applied, then wiped off, of the plaster-like expandable foam that is the main sculptural material of his new works.

Leedy's studio on 19th Terrace in the heart of the Crossroads Art District was similarly crowded last fall, with works at various stages of completion. Presiding over the creative disarray was a sculpture of the goddess Nike, which the artist patterned after the Greek masterwork "Nike of Samothrace" (about 190 B.C.) The original made to commemorate the Rhodians' naval victory over Antiochos II of Syria, is now in the Louvre. Leedy's version duplicates its shape and 8-foot-high size, but instead of flowing drapery, the goddess' body is covered with human bones.

"If you're going to make a celebration of war, you've got to show what really goes on," he insisted. "War memorials should be about war."

The piece de resistance of his grand Arts show is a 50- by 10-foot wall piece titled "The Earth Lies Screaming." Composed from a series of 12 narrow panels abutted together and covered with muddied bones and other grisly items such as a dead pigeon and a pair of children's shoes, the piece conjures images of nazi death camps, Cambodia's killing fields and the recent atrocities committed in Kosovo.

"I want you to be scared to death and if you've got the nerve, to move up and start discovering things," the artist related. Amid all the evidence of carnage he includes symbols of hope in the form of geese ready to take flight.

In the smaller north gallery at Grand Arts, Leedy has created an installation that features a totem of skulls and bones touched with phosphorescent paint mounted in a glass-fronted cabinet. A strobe light, pulsing intermittently, provides seconds of illumination. Slides of his photographs from Korea and other war images flash on the gallery walls.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

© 2000 Kansas City Star, 9 January 2000, Section J, Pg. 1, 8.

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