The November 1980 issue of ARTnews featured an article about my new medium for painting, Wildflower Works, with a photo of yours truly.
The November 1980 issue of ARTnews featured an article about the new medium for painting, Wildflower Works. |
Jim Street, Public Information
Officer of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport issued a three page press release
dated April 11, 1977, heaping praise on the Airport’s Wildflower Works.
Robert Mac Doty, Director of the
Akron Art Institute wrote a letter dated April 19, 1977 saying, “…innovative,
delightful and lots of other adjectives for your divine new work.”
Again from Jim Street of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, penned a letter dated May 1, 1978, “…you have made a real contribution to the Airport and I thank you for it.”
The Dallas/Fort Worth Airport Board of Directors received a letter written by the Texas Wildflower Protection Society dated May 10, 1979, commending the Wildflower Works, “You are very fortunate to have such an ambitious, intelligent designer and artist as Chapman Kelley working with you.”
Again from Robert Mac Doty, this time as the Director of the Currier Gallery of Art, wrote a letter dated December 18, 1979 saying, “…the piece [news media article] didn’t mention all the good work you did to support contemporary art and artists in Dallas. So there is a lot of the Chapman Kelley story still untold.” (emphasis added)
It was not a total surprise when I received a handwritten note with very encouraging comments from Lady Bird Johnson dated June 2, 1980. Notably, this was more than two years prior to the opening of the National Wildflower Research Center in December of 1982.
Louise Perry (spouse of E. Gordon
Perry Jr.) President of the Dallas Garden Club forwarded a copy to me of a
formal resolution in 1980 which states in part, "...the Dallas Garden Club
endorses the efforts of Chapman Kelley to plant wildflowers in public places
and does hereby encourage other such organizations, groups and municipalities
to commend and assist Mr. Kelley in this endeavor."
Jack W. Robinson, Director of Dallas
Parks and Recreation wrote a letter dated August 18, 1980 confirming that a
resolution has been passed by the Dallas Garden Club for "...beautifying
open spaces in Dallas through wildflower plantings...it is most gratifying to
have the support of influential citizens in such an important community
project."
Jane Scholl of the Smithsonian
Magazine in Washington D.C. wrote a letter dated April 6, 1981 informing me,
among other things, that just one more editor (of several editors) needed to
come on board so an article could be written about the Wildflower Works.
George Philip Huey Jr., Dallas Parks
and Recreation Assistant Director of Maintenance and Beautification penned a
letter dated May 21, 1981 saying the Dallas Museum of Natural
History/Wildflower Works "...can give us the impetus for more of the same
in other parts of town."
Clyde D. Walton, landscape architect
with the state of Maine Department of Transportation wrote a letter dated
August 4, 1981 informing me that my broadcast commentary with Craig for Maine Public
Radio "...came off well..." and requested a Wildflower Works catalog
for Maine Governor Joseph E. Brennan and several others.
Eddie C. Hueston, Superintendent of
Dallas Park Maintenance, wrote a letter dated September 24, 1981 saying, “Chuck
Finsley of the Dallas Museum of Natural History and Al Naugh of the [Dallas]
school system are meeting with us…to determine a site for the continuing study
of bluebonnet germination. This ‘spin off’ from the original Wildflower Works
is another cooperative effort we are happy to participate in.”
So Lady Bird Johnson was keenly aware
of my previous years' success as evidenced above, which began as early as 1976
and with the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport Wildflower Works and later the Dallas
Museum of Natural History/Wildflower Works.
In her heart she knew that the future NWRC would not fly without my
hands-on participation and top-tier guidance. She phoned her best friend Patsy
Steves of San Antonio, TX to have her ask me to approve and participate in the
steering of the future NWRC, which I did.
To feel most comfortable about the situation Lady Bird insisted that I
become a member of the NWRC's board of directors, executive committee and head
of the education committee and I did so.
What I brought to the NWRC was concept and plans for its beginning,
middle and long term viability. It was
something no one else had ever done or was capable of doing. I would soon regret my decision to get
involved.
Soon after coming on board I
recommended that the NWRC hire range scientist Dr. Thomas Jefferson Allen. Because Allen was at the time an employee
with the Texas Highway Department, we sought their approval prior to the hire
and they saw no problem. In the wake of
Dr. Allen becoming one of the staff, a meeting at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall,
Texas was convened to hear my Wildflower Works presentation which was that it
was the underpinning and driving force of the NWRC. The meeting included Laurence S. Rockefeller
(of the prominent Rockefeller family) and his wife Mary, and Nash Castro,
General Manager of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission of New Jersey. Rockefeller’s interest in the Wildflower
Works concept was stoked by that presentation.
After he left the Ranch it dawned
on him that he had an important follow-up question for me. Because Rockefeller
and Castro had attended my lecture at the same time, and after several months
had passed, Rockefeller asked Castro to refresh his memory. Castro felt that he could not answer
Laurence's query with authority. So Castro followed up with a letter to me
dated August 12, 1982 telling of his recent meeting with Rockefeller and his
question.
The two-page letter I wrote seven
days later to Nash Castro dated August 19, 1982 clearly answered Rockefeller’s
question about how and why my Wildflower Works concept could solve the world’s
lack of potable water. We proved that
the Wildflower Works was acceptable to the general public, that it thrived
solely on rainwater, used no fertilizers or insecticides and bloomed
sequentially through three seasons.
And seven days later Nash Castro
penned a letter to Laurence Rockefeller dated August 26, 1982. In the correspondence Castro tells
Rockefeller, “I think his [Chapman Kelley's] statistics are rather impressive.”
As a result of my LBJ Ranch
presentation and Nash Castro's "middleman" role to help resolve
Laurence Rockefeller's concern, everyone was delighted to learn that Laurence
promised to make a donation to the NWRC of somewhere in the $250,000 range;
Margaret McDermott contributed $25,000.
Realizing that my use of a new medium
for painting, that of using wildflowers, coupled with its massive water-saving
properties constituted a major arts/science breakthrough and with just 40 days
remaining until the official opening of the NWRC, Lady Bird Johnson penned a
letter to me dated November 12, 1982. "You are
the real pioneer!" she hand-wrote at the end
of her two-page letter.
On December 21, 1982, the evening
before the NWRC opening, Candice Land, Bonnie Leslie and my spouse Joan
accompanied me for an event with the NWRC's board of directors. The event was
organized, sponsored and paid in full by yours truly. Lady Bird was scheduled to attend. She was a no show.
The NWRC's official opening date was by design December 22, which marked Lady Bird's 70th birthday. One NWRC
board member who attended was socialite Bonnie Swearingen, wife of oil tycoon
John. Bonnie and I became friends as a result of her attending my art classes
in 1962 in Corpus Christi and where my work was shown at the Centennial Museum.
She and John became collectors of my work.
They convinced Joan and me go up to Chicago for several fundraisers,
across some years, at the Chicago chapter of the Boys and Girls Club they were
supporting. I contributed some paintings
to the events. In the fall of 1977 I was the Swearingen's guest and through
them I met Chicago mayor Michael Bilandic for the first time. That trip evolved into a press interview
about the Wildflower Works. All of this happened a solid five years before the establishment of the NWRC.
After the birthday party for Lady
Bird, Bonnie and John came to our suite to see my slide show which included the
Dallas Museum of Natural History Wildflower Works and that showed the obvious
progress through 1977. It was on this
occasion that both of them invited me to come to Chicago to do a great work!
The morning after the opening,
December 23, 1982, I learned that a superintendent with the Dallas Parks and
Recreation had been added, at the last minute, to the NWRC board of directors
and executive committee. Alarmed at the unscheduled and unannounced change, I
phoned art collector Olga Hirshhorn for advice.
She told me to get an explanation from Lady Bird. I immediately scheduled a meeting with
her. Instead it turned out to be a
meeting held much later, probably the following month, and surprisingly only
with Lady Bird’s accountant and a lawyer.
That was certainly irregular and twice that I know of that Lady Bird had
skipped out of a commitment. At some
point I took parliamentarian Mary Jo Shotts with me to one of the NWRC
executive committee meetings; she was to furnish advice on meeting protocol.
Much to my surprise I Iearned from
Texas Highway Department of Transportation landscape architect Craig Steffans
that Lady Bird had spoken with Dallas arts patron Margaret McDermott. Steffans conveyed to me that McDermott had
told Lady Bird that I had sued "her" (McDermott's) museum, the Dallas
Museum of Fine Art. McDermott was
referring to the 1975 class action lawsuit that advocated for Dallas' public
interest---an interest which unfortunately had no prior legal
representation---as part of the disputed Virginia Lazenby O'Hara $4.5 million
in Dr. Pepper stock shares bequest to the Foundation for the Arts (an ongoing
private entity) and the DMFA. I feared
that McDermott’s talk with Lady Bird had infected her with the blacklist and
that Lady Bird and her cohorts would
seek to eliminate me from the NWRC project. That would leave only one person to get
credit for my "big idea" of 1976, i.e. the Wildflower Works: Lady Bird Johnson. And I'm sure that McDermott desperately
didn't want me to continue receiving credit for this important arts and science
solution to the world's greatest future problem: managing the water supply. As
evidence of McDermott taking an adversarial position against Dallas' public
interest, at one NWRC executive meeting I played the audiotape for Lady Bird's
lawyer and accountant of the Dallas City Council hearings of the contested
Virginia Lazenby O'Hara $4.5 million bequest involving the DMFA; they heard
McDermott's testimony. (The audiotape hotlink and narrative is accessible here in
the last paragraph of art historian Sam Blain's Dallas Art History Blog.)
Within days of the NWRC opening
ceremonies I learned that it had been decided for NWRC to instead become a
clearinghouse to publish the results of others' research without NWRC actually
incurring the expense and risk of doing the hands-on work. I suspected that a ruse had taken place not
unlike the classical bait and switch ploy and that the hard research work would
never get done.
The NWRC was originally to be located in East Texas where Lady Bird had lived as a child. It was never made public as to why the NWRC
original site got switched to Austin suffice to say the new
site was located under Lady Bird's radio station towers and on land unusable
for almost anything else. The new NWRC
site was most likely used to favorable advantage on Lady Bird's federal income
tax return.
At some point Lady Bird and I were
invited to jointly give a Wildflower Works presentation in Louisiana, we
accepted--but instead of keeping the commitment she sent a staff person as a
replacement.
Since the purpose of the NWRC sprung
directly from and all about doing the research related to my Wildflower Works
concept, during one executive committee meeting I brought up the fact that a
current NWRC board member had ordered the Dallas Museum of Natural History/Wildflower Works be destroyed despite having a written agreement to the
contrary. Board member Nash Castro
responded by saying members could not discuss other member's business. The board member ended up doing a stint in
prison for unlawful sexual behavior while in a Dallas public park men's
room. The scandal was reported by the
Dallas newspapers. I felt that I had hit
the proverbial stone wall and so I had architect Peter Block pick me up from
the meeting. I declined a lunch
invitation from Lady Bird and never returned to another NWRC committee meeting.
In the spring of 1983 the Allen's and
I were at the LBJ Ranch for a barbeque where Nash Castro, then-President of the
NWRC asked Dr. Allen for his resignation.
Of course Allen was now expendable to NWRC, but that freed him up to
work with me on the Chicago Wildflower Works, hurrah! Allen was a retired Texas A&M professor
so the lost income meant little to him.
Being such a kind and conscientious person, Allen would not have engaged
in double-dipping anyway.
So the initial aim of the National
Wildflower Research Center was to provide the scientific support for what range
scientist Thomas Jefferson Allen described as a new vegetative management
system based on my Wildflower Works concept.
The millions of dollars raised for the NWRC were expected to be used for research. That is how the project was
advertised and planned. Everyone I knew
expected that Lady Bird's name would eventually be incorporated into the
Center's name, but why in the world would "research" be dropped from
it? What happened? Had the NWRC's mission changed so radically?
Had Lady Bird and her handlers schemed behind the scenes to create an
organization using my "big idea" to raise lots of funds, then change
the entity's name, and eventually establish a memorial called Lady Bird Johnson
Wildflower Center? Or had the Internal
Revenue Service intervened after receiving a tip that no research or
publication of such was forthcoming in NWRC’s new role as a clearinghouse? The IRS may have asked the NWRC for
evidence of plant research, and having not gotten any, forced the Center to
amend its name to reflect reality: the
gross lack of research activity. By
shifting the purpose and focus of the NWRC did Lady Bird and her minions dupe
Laurence S. Rockefeller, his wife Mary, Margaret McDermott and all of the other
initial contributors out of their donated cash?
These memoirs are a work in progress. Please submit information you may have to refresh my memory.
Note: With the exception of the news media images, all of the above is my copyrighted material, all rights reserved. Permission for use will be considered upon written request. Blog comments are encouraged, the use of actual full names is strongly recommended, as are affiliations with organizations.