Living treasure: Arkansas sculptor Hank Kaminsky, 79, has no intention of retiring

Sculptor Hank Kaminsky discusses his artwork during an interview in his basement studio in Fayetteville. Kaminsky was named 2018’s Arkansas LivingTreasure by the Arkansas Arts Council.
Sculptor Hank Kaminsky discusses his artwork during an interview in his basement studio in Fayetteville. Kaminsky was named 2018’s Arkansas LivingTreasure by the Arkansas Arts Council.

FAYETTEVILLE -- The sculptor Hank Kaminsky was recently honored as an Arkansas Living Treasure in downtown Fayetteville. Even with the artist present, looking lean in a white linen suit, the proceedings last month felt a bit like a funeral, a gauzy reflection of an artist renowned for his figurative and abstract casting -- what he calls his search for the "shape of the face of God."

Friends gathered, picking at hors d'oeuvres. They shared stories of Kaminsky the cutup, Kaminsky the educator, Kaminsky the thinker, Kaminsky the village sculptor, while pausing to gaze at pictures of the man flashing on a screen in the front of the room.

A lot of the images showed him at work -- tall, grinning or grimacing, his gray hair in a perpetual ponytail -- forging his most famous sculpture, the massive bronze sphere called the World Peace Prayer Fountain.

It happened to sit right outside the building, spinning on new ball bearings with water cascading down words in 100 languages that all say the same thing: "May Peace Prevail on Earth."

Peace is a theme in Kaminsky's work, though he hasn't exactly found it for himself. At 79 years old and now named an official state treasure by the Arkansas Arts Council, Kaminsky finds himself having to start over. He is trying to find buyers for work he never sold. He is contemplating a new life in a new studio, without the cast molding that made him famous. He is not sure what comes next.

There are a couple reasons, but the main one is that he almost didn't make it past 78.

. . .

In August, he traveled with his wife, Jo Ann, and some friends to the Kansas City area to view the full eclipse of the sun. On the trip, Kaminsky's throat grew sore. Really sore. At a local clinic, he got a prescription for antibiotics. The pain only got worse; he had trouble breathing.

They returned home and when he woke up the next day he tried to speak to Jo Ann. But "my words were coming out funny from a lack of oxygen to my brain," he says. "I normally put together sentences in oddball ways -- but these were really oddball."

Over the phone, his physician and friend Steve Hennigan told him to get to the hospital. There, physicians diagnosed epiglottitis, a rare inflammation of the cartilage lid that covers the windpipe and can choke off your air supply.

Medical staff shoved a tube down his throat to keep the airway clear. Then they put him in a coma while they fought the infection.

Kaminsky awoke three days later able to breathe but hardly able to swallow. He says he felt "wasted." His voice was weak; his body was weak.

Hennigan worried about him. "I just love him so much," he says. "He is Fayetteville's beloved resident sculptor. If he hadn't gone to the ER, he might not have survived."

For months afterward, Kaminsky struggled to eat, prompting physicians to install a feeding tube in his stomach that he used to feed himself pureed food and baby formula.

He lost 40 pounds while he frequented a speech therapist to learn how to swallow again. It wasn't until Christmas, at a wedding reception full of food and friends that he decided he couldn't take it anymore. "I said, 'I'm going to eat that piece of chicken,' and I chewed a whole lot and swallowed carefully, and I ate that piece of chicken. That was the beginning of my comeback."

But Kaminsky is not fully back. He may never be. He is still thin. His voice is raspy. He is tentative around certain foods. Peanut butter terrifies him, "and I used to love peanut butter," he sighs.

. . .

A few days before being celebrated as an Arkansas Living Treasure, Kaminsky puttered around his studio in the basement of The Art Experience, an art-therapy center owned and operated by his wife.

Worn workbenches surrounded him, scattered with tools and wares from over the years: a collection of loose spheres of zinc defined by their negative space, looking almost torn apart; chunks of cast bronze; jewelry that reflects his fascination with the organic and the crystalline, shaped in bars and blobs. He used to sell them at the Fayetteville Farmers Market when he was well.

Kaminsky has come to the studio every day for months, but he can't work. His strength has been sapped. Instead he comes here to sift through the remnants of what is left of his life as a sculptor. "I'm assessing what I've got and what I've done and marking it to go certain places."

One of those places is the special collections at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, library -- a recognition of his contributions to the school and the state. He can't dawdle. The Kaminskys recently sold the studio and art-therapy center -- where generations of young artists were tutored under them -- to the university for its expanding art campus.

"It's really appropriate," Hank Kaminsky said. "We've had an art establishment here for 25 years and it always has been a school of art."

Over the decades, Kaminsky developed a bond with the University of Arkansas. He earned his bachelor's degree there in 1985, and won repeated commissions that shaped the aesthetic of its public face.

He crafted the ceremonial mace for the Walton College of Business commencement, the Fulbright College Honors medal; several bronze busts of UA benefactors, including one of Sam Walton; a full statue of a razorback hog (its head points toward the library, he notes); and the lifting, swirling, The Miracle of the Double Helix for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

The collection will document Kaminsky's contributions to the UA system; he's donating early drafts of his pieces, as well as personal documents.

But Joshua Youngblood, an associate professor with the UA library system who's supervising the collection, says Kaminsky's work documents an impressive working career for an artist that spans five decades and traces the arc of the regional art community.

"I consider him to be a really important figure in the counter-culture in the Ozarks," Youngblood says. "He was thinking about artistic process, but he went through the counter culture, art colonies, the development of nonprofits, and cultural engagement at regional and national levels."

. . .

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

These busts of children were created by sculptor Hank Kaminsky, Arkansas’ Living Treasure for 2018.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

The World Peace Prayer Fountain, created by Hank Kaminsky, is in front of the Fayetteville Town Center.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

Fayetteville sculptor Hank Kaminsky reflects on more than 50 years of creating art.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

One-of-a-kind belt buckles have been created by Hank Kaminsky for decades. He used to sell them at the Fayetteville Farmers Market.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

Along with his abstract sculptures, Fayetteville resident Hank Kaminsky also creates jewelry, including earrings.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette

A piece of fiberglass artwork by Hank Kaminsky.

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Kaminsky grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with a facility for science and engineering before discovering the world of art. As a young sculptor in the big city he found it hard to get noticed. One day in 1971, a buddy told him about Eureka Springs, which was forming an intentional art community and needed a metal-crafting shop.

Plus, he noted, the women were beautiful.

Kaminsky, recently divorced, started walking to Arkansas, catching a few rides along the way. He arrived three weeks later. "I just loved it," he says. The locals didn't really care for abstract sculpture, "but they sure did like my belt buckles."

Kaminsky started crafting more jewelry to supplement the sculpture, and he met his future wife, Jo Ann. In the early 1980s, they moved to Fayetteville -- with their two small children -- for the schools.

The children attended Washington Elementary, where the Kaminskys made friends with other parents. Julie Minkel remembers Hank Kaminsky having to deliver pizza for a while in the 1980s to keep his art and his family going.

"It would have been easier to find a different line of work," she says, "but he always stayed true to his life as an artist."

He did have successes. One day he pulled up to Minkel outside the elementary school with a new washing machine in the back of his truck and shouted: "I just sold a naked lady!"

Scott Sutton, a psychotherapist, met Kaminsky 30 years ago at a Parent Teacher Organization meeting at the same school. "He was sitting in a third-grade desk all folded up. I looked over and thought, 'weird.'"

The two became best friends, raising their kids together and taking them swimming at Hog Scald Hollow during the hot summer months. They still go out every Friday night and hit a lot of concerts.

"He's very knowledgeable about music, kind of a renaissance man," Sutton says. "The only thing I can't get him to do is anything with a ball. He has no idea what sports are for."

As Kaminsky's career grew, he took on students of sculpture and sand-metal casting, teaching them the art of carving impressions in a mixture of clay, oil, and sand and pouring in the molten metal to cool.

"He's a role model for our students," says Jeannie Hulen, the associate dean of fine arts at UA. "Hank is one of those pillars of the community, not just as an artist but as a business person. [Hank and Jo Ann] are like helical piers for the school of art."

. . .

Kaminsky has major art installations across the state -- Fayetteville, Little Rock, Bryant, Clinton, Springdale, the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport -- and his work can be found in California, Pennsylvania and Washington.

He made busts of famous people, including J. William Fulbright and Chelsea Clinton. He did a thousand more, he estimates, usually as the person sat in front of him, making art happen on the spot, sometimes in a mall the way other artists draw caricatures.

But, Kaminsky is primarily a community guy. He was born in New York, but he is of Arkansas now.

A sign outside his studio reads Village Sculptor. "That's a political statement," he says. "People here go to New York and L.A. to buy their art work and there are a lot of artists here who are asking for your help. You have to support them."

And he didn't just talk about community. Kaminsky was active in the Fayetteville Underground artists' collective, the Fayetteville Farmers Market, the local co-op, the local arts council, and he helped start the Artists of Northwest Arkansas.

And the community came out for Kaminsky at his reception at the Fayetteville Town Center when he was crowned an Arkansas Living Treasure. He smiled and cracked jokes. He said he learned a lot through his study of landscapes, of crystalline and organic structures, of figurative art, about the shape of the face of God -- "and it wasn't just because I was stoned."

And Kaminsky made it clear he has work to sell. In fact, he has more than $50,000 invested in one set of unsold sculptures.

So, he's trying to be a salesman in addition to an artist. When the images of his jewelry came up on the slide show during his reception, he announced they could be found at the gift shop at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art or at David Adams Fine Jewelry in Fayetteville.

On another slide he noted certain pieces of sculpture were "still in need of a patron. Hint, hint, hint."

He and Jo Ann have bought a new studio on College Avenue in Fayetteville. She will use her portion of the space to continue her practice as an art therapist and educator.

Kaminsky does not know what he will do with his. He needs money, but his illness has left him feeling faint. He says he is not retiring, that he will always be a sculptor even if he can longer sculpt.

He has a plan to avoid retirement.

In his new studio he has prepared a room with nothing in it. There is only the floor and the walls and the window.

"I'm going to begin by bringing in something," he says, "and I do not know what that is. I know it's going to be something that has to do with what I am and what I've been through.

"The second object will tell me more and the third and the fourth and so on.

"It may not be art. It may be music. It may poetry. I have no idea.

"And this is really interesting to me."

And this is how an artist does not retire.

Style on 07/01/2018

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