Terra Studios celebrated 50 years of operation with a festival on the park grounds Saturday, Oct. 11. The date also marks a decade since the for-profit company switched to a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
The festival was a day long event of interactive art, live music and food trucks. Several vendors and art stations were scattered around the park, providing lots to do for guests. A scavenger hunt provided by a wizard took guests throughout the park as well.
The festival was a day long event of interactive art, live music and food trucks. Several vendors and art stations were scattered around the park, providing lots to do for guests. A scavenger hunt provided by a wizard took guests throughout the park as well.
Terra Studios is a community art park that exists as a home for both art and artists with parks and residences across 27 acres of land in Durham, Arkansas. The park started as a business. Glass blowers working there created Bluebirds of Happiness and giftware until changes in the park’s financial structure and direction led the organization to shift its focus and values.
James Ulick purchased the park in 2007 with the intention of establishing the park as a place for the community after being involved in its business operations in previous decades. He made the executive decision to give Terra Studios to the community, incorporating it as a non-profit organization.
The grounds are mostly open to the public. There are several buildings and structures with a main building acting as an integrated art display and showroom. Guests can explore most places in the buildings with several areas dedicated to art classes and galleries. Much of the park exists outside as art installations and fixtures outside.
Terra Studios is funded by donations, art class fees and other nominal sales. Recent slashes to federal art grants have affected Terra Studios as well, but the newly finished event center is now available and intends to bring in the support they need, Ulick said.
Ulick sees his decision to shut down the carbon dioxide-intensive glass furnaces and cease bluebird production as the biggest difference he could make for the future.
“If everyone involved here in Terra stopped doing anything that involved carbon, we wouldn’t have come near to what the furnaces were doing,” Ulick said about just how much the furnaces were making an impact on the environment.
The park now exists as a humble home for art for all ages and guests from all over. Before shutting down the furnaces for good, the decision was made to make excess glass blue birds so they could remain available for purchase while supplies last. Once they are gone they are gone, Ulick said.
“We encourage people to contact us and talk to us about putting pieces out here. The gallery has always been focused on people who are starting their careers,” Ulick said, talking about how Terra Studios exists as both a birthplace and resting place for art of all forms.
The pieces across the park vary in age extensively with collections from many different artists. Growing subtly over the decades, pieces across the park range from mini houses and mini cities for little clay people, trash cans decorated as “trash trolls” to a walkable re-creation of the labyrinth.
Steele Milligan, a traveling wizard and enjoyer of Terra Studios, entertained guests at the festival by leading a scavenger anyone could participate in. The hunt involved guests searching for 50 ducks hidden across the park.
The ducks could be found on top of signs or low nestled between art fixtures on the ground, but guests had to look and think outside the box. These ducks were not normal ducks; they were unique clay figures matching the themes of the areas they were found in with blended characteristics of a duck varying in color, size and shape.
Milligan said that Terra Studios being a nonprofit community art gallery not only serves the community as a venue for entertainment but also as an ever-present home for art in its many forms.
Terra Studios has changed form and function since its opening 50–years ago but has established itself for the community as a home of art to preserve it for years to come.