How Adrienne Luther makes art in and for the Columbia community

To borrow and bend an old Rod Stewart line, every tattoo tells a story, doesn't it?

Some tattoos pay tribute to a lost friend or a fleeting moment's beauty; others testify to resiliency through trials. Of course, others still tell tales of youthful impulse. But whatever image they bear, however well they wear, they say something about who we were and who we've become since.

It's the same with public art. A sculpture or mural articulates something about the surrounding community: who it was, what they valued at the moment of its conception. Public artwork also, inherently, offers itself to the years, to be loved and hated and interpreted as time passes.

Adrienne Luther keeps these realities in mind while making art in and for the Columbia community. A muralist, illustrator and designer, Luther acknowledges the resemblance between images impressed upon a body and those she paints across brick, mortar and glass.

"It does feel like I’m tattooing the community," Luther said.

Every artist who calls Columbia home leaves their mark. Some marks and mark-makers are just more visible. Consider David Spear, whose paintings live in civic spaces, schools and iconic restaurants. Or Lisa Bartlett, whose art is entwined with the local music scene.

With every piece, and the accompanying first chapter of its narrative, Luther inches toward their company. Her work is unmistakable in the Arcade District at the north edge of downtown, recognizable at Tropical Liqueurs on Broadway, and dresses up the new Wendy's near the University of Missouri campus. Her designs also walk through the community on T-shirts for Goldie's Bagels and Missouri River Relief.

As she collects opportunities to leave community tattoos, Luther owns a desire to ensure her work is thoughtful and keeps pace with the stories of her neighbors.

Lessons Luther learns with each job

Pace is an important word to Luther at this point in her career. Keep up with the artist on social media, or on the streets of mid-Missouri, and it seems she's always working.

She carries lessons from one job to the next: about managing her time, about how her materials — and her own body — will react to drizzling rain, serious heat, another one more hour in the day. Luther creates a relationship with each window, each wall and needs to know how it will respond to circumstances beyond either of their control, she said.

Luther prefers to begin her day at Cafe Berlin, where she applies her strategic communication degree in marketing efforts and booking evening events. Devoting energy to a collective endeavor and clear purpose feels grounding, Luther said, and renews her creative energy.

Cafe Berlin is a community hub — for meals, for music, for makers' markets — and the implications of in-person community is an increasing focus of Luther's, from concept to completion. 21st-century artists need to be online, to foster a digital reach. And Luther has, with more than 4,000 followers on Instagram and another 1,500 or so on Facebook.

What's key, she says, is ensuring the work she does on street corners and scaffolds, moving in and around other people, informs her digital presence and not the other way around.

Keeping communities in mind

Luther moves community to the front of her mind, whether creating for Columbia or another locale, whether collaborating with a small business or a larger corporate entity. Working across those lines is something she's doing more and more.

Completing projects for corporate clients is surprisingly hassle-free, Luther said. They typically have the creative process down to a science and, working at the scale of big business, aren't terribly interested in micro-managing one Midwestern artist, allowing her relative freedom.

She has created regionally specific murals for Walmart stores in locations such as Fort Worth, Texas; Slidell, Louisiana; and Lansing, Illinois. Creating a similar piece for a Leavenworth, Kansas store, Luther paused to align her ethics with the true story of a community best known for military installations and prisons. Ultimately, her design leaned into real themes of optimism and progress present in the area, she said.

Luther wants to ask similar questions and apply the same deliberation to her mid-Missouri projects. She knows public art opens the door to criticism — sometimes, rightly so. Murals can become means of gentrification, she said; they're also read differently by different segments of the population.

"I’ve had to do a lot of critical thinking about where my place is, and where we can bring public art into a space that also is not stepping on any toes — I just don’t want to be ignorant about some of the context," she said.

These concerns ultimately guide her to a deeper knowledge of the community, Luther added.

The artist went deep this spring when asked to complete a mural inside Rock Bridge High School's media center. The daughter of educators, she places a high value on the work done in schools.

Luther primarily collaborated with Rock Bridge librarians who, true to form, assigned her homework, sending her away from meetings with reference materials — including yearbooks from across the past 50 years.

"Every meeting felt fulfilling," Luther said.

Her design emphasized aspects and activities which make the high school experience "fulfilling," she said. Sports and science classes, music and photography are represented; but so are the school's therapy dog, the area's flora and natural landmarks. Students can't see out from the library windows, so the mural allows them chances to at least ponder nature, Luther said.

The act of painting took her back to the best of high school. Creating during spring break, Luther worked with audiobooks between her ears, especially those by authors such as John Green — the very narratives she absorbed while in high school.

"It felt like a release ... it felt emotionally driven for me," she recalled. "It felt like I had just run a marathon or something. I had a high afterwards."

Looking forward, Luther continues to seek converging opportunities: to paint for the community and also integrate what matters most to her in a given moment, whether that's family or caretaking, spirituality or other means of human connection.

Looking around, she inevitably spies her own work in Columbia and, like running your eyes over a tattoo, is learning to move past self-criticism and second-guessing. She will recall why she was drawn to a certain color at a certain time, will see how she was evolving as a young woman during a specific project, she said.

"I feel like I’m growing with the community," Luther said. "Each piece, for me, it’s personal because I remember where I was at when I was painting something. It’s represented in the work."

Encountering her own work grants those all-too-rare moments of reflection we all need, and Luther hopes they provoke similar moments for others.

See more of Luther's work at https://www.adrienneluther.com/.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Artist Adrienne Luther's ideals keep her creating in community