Spartan Profiles: Jim Leedy

ARTIST ACROSS BOUNDARIES

            Some artists, like Van Gogh, are appreciated too late. After a half-century of pioneering work in art—during which he brought abstract expressionism to American ceramics—painter-sculptor Jim Leedy, M.A. ’59, founding chief of the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, is now getting his due.

            A new biography by Matthew Kangas, Artist Across Boundaries (University of Washington Press, 2000), has just been published, hailing Leedy as “the most important artist to have lived in Kansas City since Thomas Hart Benton.” Jim’s works as a painter and ceramics sculptor are receiving kudos from the media and, within the last year, have been recognized by four area exhibits.

            The “Grand Arts” in January featured his magnum opus, The Earth Lies Screaming, a 50-x-10 foot work comparable to Picasso’s Guernica in scope and emotion. “It’s about war,” says Jim, a military photographer during the Korean War who kept his experiences “private” until a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC brought him to tears and prompted his latest anti-war works.

            Jim recalls MSU as a “fabulous experience” where he befriended the likes of Reginald Pollock (brother of Jackson Pollock, who, along with other abstract expressionists like DeKooning, became Jim’s friends in New York after MSU). He says he “worshipped” such MSU professors “art historian Dr. Soria, the painter Murray Jones, and lithographer DeMartellis.”

            Jim recalls one episode at MSU with humor. “We were moving from a chicken coop to our new building (Kresge Art Museum building),” he recounts. “Everybody was careful not to mess up. The floors were spotless. Well, I accidentally dropped a bucket of paint in the middle of the corridor. Everyone was frantic. But now that I reflect on it, I can say that Kresge became an art building after that. What I did broke the ice.”