T he Ramsey looks like it was dropped by a tornado into the Bluefield Downtown Commercial Historic District. All that’s missing is a pair of ruby slippers. The six-story, 33,000-square-foot building is wedged into a hillside at the corner of Ramsey and Russell streets. Opened in 1926, The Ramsey was Bluefield’s primary elementary school for more than 60 years. It earned Bluefield its own recognition in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! as “the school with the most multi-level entrances”—you can enter four floors from the ground level. From the tilting flower pots to the five-level roof, The Ramsey must be seen to be believed. “When people walk in the front door, you see it come over their face—Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” says Vicki Queen, director and curator of Gary Bowling’s House of Art. The Ramsey was donated to Gary Bowling’s House of Art in 2016 and is home to a museum, an art gallery, a 350-seat auditorium, a gymnasium, a commercial kitchen, and classrooms–turned–artists’ studios. And indeed, it’s like the world outside is in black and white and the House of Art unfolds in glorious Technicolor. The man behind the curtain—the Wizard himself—is Bluefield native Gary Bowling.
Where Angels Fear to Tread Bluefield, once referred to as “Little Chicago,” was a boomtown in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, like many small towns founded on coal, Bluefield went to soot. “It’s artistic people who go where angels fear to tread,” Bowling says. Bowling returned to Bluefield in 1972 after a successful career in the City of Angels—Los Angeles. He’s a painter and junk artist and has been picking up and recycling found objects since before it was chic. Everything in the Queen’s Tomb—an Egyptian-themed landing at the House of Art—is made from trash: 6,000 fly traps turned into architectural trim, a sphinx-like camel with wooden clothespin teeth, and a sarcophagus made from a shipping crate. Lying in state is the papier- mâché and cardboard Lady Pharaoh Hazel, named after the deceased woman who, in 1947, was shipped from Oklahoma to Bluefield in that now-sarcophagus shipping crate. In the main gallery, you’ll get a retrospective showing of more than 50 years of Bowling’s work, including his series “Garyglyphics,” a hieroglyphic-style retelling of the history of the world.
Everything in The Queen’s Tomb, including the Lady Pharaoh Hazel herself, is made from trash.
92 wvl • fall 2020
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online