Sculptures on Display at Global Campus Reflect Artist’s Ideas on World Peace

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Hank Kaminsky

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Fayetteville artist Hank Kaminsky’s “World Peace Prayer Fountain,” at the Fayetteville Town Center, expressed his goal of creating sculpture to capture the idea of world peace. In the process, however, he created smaller “sculptural excerpts” that project the idea in different forms.

Several of these smaller art pieces and a pictorial display explaining how Kaminsky created the prayer fountain, will be on exhibit from Wednesday, Dec. 2, through the end of January at the University of Arkansas Global Campus Center for Continuing Education at 2 E. Center St., Fayetteville. The exhibit also features jewelry made through metal sandcasting.

The display, “Redefining the Medium: a Sculptor Looks at Sandcasting,” is free and open to the public from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday. It is a part of the Global Campus’ ongoing mission to support the growing art community in historic downtown Fayetteville.

Kaminsky will help open the exhibit at 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, Dec. 2. The artwork will also be on display that afternoon in conjunction with a member meeting of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Arkansas that begins at 1 p.m. and is followed by a holiday gathering for the institute from 1:30 to 3 p.m.

Kaminsky, 70, is a New York City native who moved to Eureka Springs in 1971, where he opened a gallery and taught metal sandcasting. He moved to Fayetteville in 1984, continuing his craft. Today, his work is displayed in thousands of private collections as well as in public areas.

Kaminsky enjoys watching visitors glide their fingertips over his sculptures and listening to viewers’ reactions to the metalwork.

“I want people to be open to whatever message that the sculpture gives them,” Kaminsky said.

His work joins the concepts of natural structures like land formations with man-made structures like language, metal and art. The largest sculpture on display at the Global Campus, the “Jerusalem Pulpit,” is a cylinder rising about 4-feet tall with an angled top.

“The Jerusalem Pulpit is the same concept as the fountain, but it is presented in a different way, a religious way,” Kaminsky said.

The pulpit is flanked by three “imaginary landforms” or “typomythical projections” mounted on foot-long metal beam fragments. At a distance, the works appear to be miniature slices from the Earth’s crust with plateaus, plains and ridges. As the viewer walks closer, words and phrases – “peace,” “my conscience,” “new spirit” and “revolution” – emerge like the man-made structures, offering messages as different and complex as the people standing before the works.

The landform sculptures in the “Excerpts from a Landscape” series are part of a larger group called “Pages from the Book of the Earth,” which join the concepts of “the Earth speaks” and “world peace.”