How could a town with a population of 2,166 (at last census) manage to attract 750,000 tourists per year? The oversimplified answer is that Eureka Springs, Arkansas has a great deal going for it. Not the least of which is the art.
Not only are there countless numbers of eclectic shops where you can buy all manner of artsy things, but there is also quite a bit of quirky public art to enjoy. Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall here. Statues abound. There are murals as far as the eye can see. Even some of the many stairways are beautifully painted.
There is also a long wall of 3D interactive art, which is something I’d never seen before. You scan the QR code that you will find there, and it takes you to an app that shows you amazing moving images that pop right out at you whenever you point your phone at one of the panels. There’s even one that allows you to see one of the town’s oldest buildings being constructed from the ground up, with the help of historic photographs that were converted into a stop action video. It was quite a marriage of the modern and the historic.
People’s yards were also uniquely decorated. We kept seeing bottle trees everywhere, and most of the bottles were blue. One house had thousands of blue bottles as landscaping. I assumed they were bottles from a local brewery or something, but I was wrong. According to this blog post, it seems that these blue bottles come from an ancient, practically global belief that evil spirits could be captured in bottles at night, and they would be destroyed the next day by the hot sun. These spirits, it was said, were particularly attracted to the color blue.
Others believe that these blue bottles have healing qualities. Whatever the motivation for their existence in this little town in Arkansas, I found them to be quite pretty. And that beauty was everywhere.
While dwelling on art, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Christ of the Ozarks. This 65.5 foot sculpture of Jesus with arms outstretched (it has a 65 foot “wingspan”). Is not to be missed. It’s just on the outskirts of Eureka Springs, and it has a rather fascinating history.
It was erected in 1966, and commissioned by Gerald L.K. Smith. That man was a piece of work. He was a white supremacist, a virulent racist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier. He was against communism, and had pro-Nazi sympathies. He tried to run for president, but got less than 2,000 votes. Referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Smith often talked of “driving that cripple out of the White House.”
Smith decided to retire just outside of Eureka Springs, where he renovated a mansion and created what amounts to a religious theme park. You can still see a passion play there 3 days a week, 6 months of the year. When we went there to see the statue, the place was eerily deserted, and frankly, I still had to resist the urge to run for the hills.
But even for a non-Christian like me, Christ of the Ozarks is a fascinating statue to look at. Given its boxy body, the more irreverent residents of Eureka Springs call this statue Milk Carton Jesus. The artist kind of left his creation wide open for that description, if you ask me.
With all the quirky creativity that surrounds you in Eureka Springs, I was sad to leave it. But while there, I quickly learned to stop telling the locals that I was considering retiring in their fair town, because the smile would quickly fade from their faces. That’s understandable. If even one percent of the annual tourists that come to this amazing place then decided to never leave, this cozy town would lose all its eclectic charm. And we can’t have that, can we?
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