PUMP HOUSE MURAL - 'CONFLUENCE'
2014, John Pugh
John Pugh created Confluence to celebrate the role of La Crosse as a sacred place. This sacred status arises from the interaction between the region’s rivers, landscape, and all the people who have called it home.
About 24,000 BCE, glaciers covered much of the Upper Midwest with ice more than a mile thick. These glaciers scraped the land nearly flat as they grew and spread south. However, the Driftless Area escaped glaciation, leaving steep bluffs and deep coulees intact. When the glaciers surrounding this area began melting about 16,000 years ago, they released torrents of raging water. This water, over a period of millennia, carved the unglaciated landscape, forming the Black, La Crosse, and Mississippi Rivers, which converge here in La Crosse.
The first people of the region were nomadic hunters and gathers, pursuing Ice Age mastodons and mammoths, and later the deer, fish, and small game that still populate the countryside. More recently, mound builders and farmers, including the Ho-Chunk, filled the river valleys with villages and cornfields. Centuries later, waves of immigrants arrived from other continents.
Confluence was envisioned by internationally renowned artist John Pugh and created by him with assistance from his staff, local artists, and apprentices. The brick wall of the Pump House Regional Arts Center was covered with a white plaster. The mural was painted on strips of non-woven canvas that were applied to the plastered wall, similar to the way that wallpaper is hung.
The art technique employed to paint this mural is trompe l’oeil, which deceives the eye into seeing three-dimensional illusions. Did you notice, for example, how the glaciers seem to jut out of the sides of the mural or that the painted bricks match the real bricks on the front of the building?
The 25-by-60-foot mural was dedicated June 14, 2014, during the first Artspire La Crosse celebration. The mural was funded by an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as State, County, City, corporate, foundation, and private support.
This mural on the Pump House Regional Arts Center in the heart of the La Crosse Arts District celebrates the spirit of this place and the importance of the arts, artists, and other creative people in forming and expressing our community’s identity. It also celebrates the convergence of many diverse peoples that have given La Crosse its unique culture.
Artist Statement
by John Pugh
Mural dedicated La Crosse, WI 6/13/2014
Wrapped inside a giant arc of glacial ice dwells the sheltering cove we now call La Crosse. We’re on the inside, at the heart of the fruit looking outward toward the peel. It is a vantage point caught in the moment, yet spans the roots of the people and formation of the land. It’s a small still point on the river from which concentric ripples begin, yet we may experience all that encircles us. It’s a journey in which the destination is here.
This mural entitled Confluence, explores the unique environment, heritage and diverse community of La Crosse. The mural isn’t trying to relive another time — of “what it must have been like back then” — but celebrates today. All that has made this enchanting place, this sanctuary space that so many people call home, is reflected in a great confluence all around us.
Looking carefully out at the bluffs and valleys, the unique geological story of this driftless region is present. In the mural we look out through tree terraces, through great bluff-shaped dolomite walls, to the ice mantle of a surrounding glacier that never came inside here. Here, there is the confluence of icelessness. Henry David Thoreau said “In wildness is the preservation of the world”, and as it is with the ancient valley formations – or coulees – the glaciers never came to grind them away. Through three ice ages the earliest people came to this prairie valley shelter to live. Survival is what drew so many here long ago, and the unique beauty of this land is what draws so many today, all because the glaciers never came.
Then there’s the confluence of the three rivers: the Mississippi, La Crosse, and Black Rivers. Look again at the mural, at the three ice walls that are revealed through canyon-shaped openings, and the joined river below. La Crosse is the cross-rivers; the heart pumping sustenance through vast river arteries – transporting, reaching, nourishing, connecting. Ever renewing the circle of life. Echoes from the first river heartbeat can still be heard, seen, tasted, inhaled and felt.
Life on the river is eternal. It’s Peace. It’s the stuff from where dreams are woven. The romantic past of the riverboat era – all the stories, all the steamboats from all the different periods – can all be seen reflected in splendid layers on the “Queen” that’s rolling on the river right now. It’s the floating centerpiece of this mural. As for the the future, there are the reflecting ripples of what is, the lyrical weavings of reflections to come, and the heartbeat of the river that will echo on.
On the curved wall are reflections of the diverse community around us. They’re not necessarily famous people or historical figures. They’re not posed portraits looking back at us. They’re images of open heartfelt people living their lives here in La Crosse. They’re reflections of us.
Connecting with our heritage here is like looking up at the stars. All the points of light are from different points of time, from 100,000 years to eight minutes ago. We experience them all simultaneously at this moment, yet they are history. The stories of the early settlers, the Hmong, the Ho-Chunk and all the ancestors that came before, the entire story of who we are and what we have been, is present in the confluence of us. It’s in our memory body. You can see it reflected in your neighbor’s eyes and hear it in their voice.
Tracy Littlejohn - Hear Here
Tracy Littlejohn
Tracy Littlejohn became involved in the process of bringing a trompe-l’oeil style mural to La Crosse after realizing that she was a fan of the artist’s work. She has personal connections to several of the people reflected in the mural. Tracy appreciates the efforts to make the mural culturally and historically accurate as it is trying to encompass all aspects of the city of La Crosse.
Hear her story HERE.
Transcript
We’re looking at the west wall of the Pump House where a mural was unveiled in June of 2014. It’s a mural that was done by John Pugh in the trompe-l’oeil style of artwork. It was a pretty big event. I first got involved with it because I had seen that they had gotten a grant to get this mural done and I knew it was going to be in the trompe-l’oeil style, and then the artist was in town last fall, 2013, and he stopped in at the Hmoob Cultural and Community Agency to talk with some of the elders and let them know what he was doing because he actually has quite an interest in the diverse populations. And it was at that point that I realized I was actually an admirer of his work.
And that same night they were holding an open meeting for people to come in and see what the art mural was going to be about, so I attended that. It was really an interesting night, at one point they had asked what La Crosse meant to people in the audience. And I actually wanted to say it felt like home to me, because I’m Ho-Chunk and my family has been here for a very long time of course. But I didn’t feel like everyone would understand it to the same extent that I do. And then after that got done I actually just went up to say hello to John Pugh and he invited me and one of my coworkers to go have dinner and we ended up talking for a couple hours. I was really impressed with how he wanted to go about doing this because he really wanted to get a picture of the diverse populations of La Crosse actually in the art work. And at one point while he was working on it he was asking for pictures of Ho-Chunks.
And I came over because he had been here for about a month working on it and it was all covered with tarp so nobody could really see it, and he invited me to come up and take a look. And I got up there and one of the primary persons or portraits that’s on there right in the center I, I almost cried because that’s actually in Ho-Chunk tradition one of my grandsons, Levi Blackdeer. Kinship structure is very different but, my great grandmother and his great great grandmother were sisters. And I was just awestruck that he had taken that particular image because the image he was using was from when my grandfather was granted the Medal of Honor for being a code talker during WWII. So I remember that exact moment in time when that picture was taken that he based that portrait off of. And than I looked and I saw other individuals that I actually knew or I knew about, like Merlin RedCloud, and then there’s even a picture of three Hmong elders who are actually elders that I recognize. So I was just really, deeply, impacted by the photographs he used to base some of these portraits off of on this mural.
The mural just, it represents basically the people of La Crosse, you can see someone rowing in the water, you can see images from Oktoberfest, a medical doctor. And, you know, the backset is the bluffs and you see the water and the steamboat, and I just think he did a really great job of portraying La Crosse as a community. I love it, and I know part of the reason that they chose to put it on the wall of the Pump House was because this is kind of more of an art district, it is a good way to get people to come down here and get to know the arts area of La Crosse. And I think it’s important for people to come here and remember some of the history of La Crosse. Some of these are more historical portraits; some of them are more contemporary. There’s someone on there that is still a young person, there’s people that have passed on. And I think it is just a great thing to see and to remind people of everyone that’s been here, not just in the last hundred years but everyone who’s been here.
I just really appreciated that they wanted to go with the trompe-l’oeil, because a lot of art work around La Crosse is statue or it’s very traditional two dimensional, and with the trompe-l’oeil you get the three dimensional and I think it is a really great way to show more contemporary types of artwork. My name is Tracy Littlejohn, I am a member of the Ho-Chunk nation, and I was born and raised here in La Crosse. I think it’s important to hear stories from all kinds of people. We are used to hearing a lot of stories from the mainstream community, and I’m not quite there, part of the mainstream community, and I appreciate that people seek out our thoughts about things.
2014 Angela Schrabeck
2014 Aperture Photography
2014 Roger Grant
