Cedar Rapids, who knew?

To my surprise, I've found myself in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa several times in the last couple of weeks. Cedar Rapids a pretty white-bread place. Chain restaurants do very well. Trends arrive two years after they become blase on the coasts. The city is used as a testing ground for products (such as the infamously "explosive" Olestra Potato Chips) because it's so ordinary. It's known for flooding, Rockwell, and a mysterious extra season more than it is for its character, class, or art.

So imagine the pleasant shock I received when this weekend I spent a very enjoyable evening at an art gallery (okay, so it's actually in Marion, not Cedar Rapids, but anyone from the area will understand that it is close enough). Campbell Steele Gallery has been in Marion for years, and I know I've been there a time or two in the past, but on Saturday nights the gallery is in the evening, not only to sell art, but to host musical guests. Since a friend of a friend as bartending at the event, we all headed downtown Marion to check it out. Here's a taste:


The gallery space.



Upstairs studio.

The gallery is an open space with high, old-style decorative ceilings and with multicolored glass artworks hanging cheerfully in the front window. Scattered tables housed couples and a few small groups mostly of the 30s to 60s crowd (and a few of us party crashing young-uns like myself). Some were short with chairs, some tall with stools or just for standing, each with a wine bottle with a simple flowered arrangement. Past the art, the audience, and the band, a a small cash bar featuring a few wines, a few (choice) beers, and some tasty looking platters of fruit and cheeses at moderate prices ($5/glass, $4/beer, $12 for tasty snacks).

The band on this particular Saturday was World Port, a duo of guys from the Des Moines area that play an eclectic mix of jazz and all kinds of "world music" (at one moment I felt like I was at a bar mitzvah, the next I felt like doing an Irish jig) with only a guitar and an electric horn. What's an electric horn, you ask? It's like the synthesizer of horns: it can produce all kinds of different kinds of sounds, but you still blow into it and it has fingering "like a trumpet."

The people who own the gallery are also artists, and use the upstairs studio. The upstairs, which is, I gather, not always open, is absolutely beautiful. Brick walls, the gears for an old elevator, lots of plants, hardwood floor, open space, warm light, a docile dog named Buddy...I'd never want to leave. And the thing is, they don't. The front of the upstairs studio space is where they live, and the sitting area we were lounging on, he informed us, was in fact their after-hours livingroom.

The whole evening made me want to be an artist. Though it probably helped that they were the lucky, well-established, and successfully-wine-drinking, world-music-listening types, instead of the starving types.

I'll be going back when they have a pianist, as I'm itching to hear that shiny grand they have in action. I recommend you come with me.