LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) — Danny Campbell was a fairly conventional artist when he started teaching at Fulton County Schools in Georgia. While living in Atlanta, a split-second would change his life and he faces that demon with an exhibition at the Arkansas Capitol Building.
His tire sculptures are on display until March 16 along with sculptures from Alice Guffey Miller as well as students from eStem and Maumelle high schools.
Campbell had been using found objects for quite some time, but a moment in Atlanta made his life’s work clear: save lives.
Behind an 18-wheeler, a quick reaction saved his own life when a blown out tire flew right at him.
“On my way home, I was driving behind a big 18-wheeler,” Campbell said. “And all of a sudden the tire blew out on one of the 18-wheelers. And the tire tread came off of the rim and nearly came through my windshield, and killing me instantly.”
He pulled over to gather himself before driving home. But he was unable to sleep for months. When he did get some shut-eye, he was plagued with nightmares of death by flying tire scrap.
As Campbell researched the topic, he found some sobering statistics.
Between 2011-2014, road debris was a factor in a total of more than 200,000
police-reported crashes, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
“I was very, very surprised about that,” he said. “ I believe my life was spared. And that’s my mission in life, to save other people’s lives. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. I can’t save people in a courtroom or even an operation, but my main purpose is to save other people’s lives by pickin’ up tire treads on the highway.”
That’s what he’s been doing in the years since the near-death experience in Atlanta. It wasn’t about art for him. The statistics showed him the need to clean up debris off the roads.
But the neighborhood association became concerned when Campbell started stockpiling tire scraps and other debris in his yard.
“I kept my yard in perfect condition,” he said. “So I started hiding the tire treads. I didn’t have the vision to find out what I wanted to do with those tire treads until later on.”
But the scraps, of course, made their way into his artwork.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) decided his work, along with Guffey Miller’s were a perfect way to show get the public’s attention to a piece of legislation from 2017, Act 317. They invited high school students at eStem and Maumelle High to join in for a chance to present used tire sculptures, too.
The act created the Used Tire Recycling and Accountability Program (TAP) that updates waste tire procedures as well as provides incentives for used tire recycling and creates the Used Tire Recycling Fund.
On March 6, Campbell, the local students and Guffey Miller came to present their work at the Capitol with a short kick-off by the ADEQ’s Senior Policy Advisor Andrea Hopkins.
Guffey Miller is hard to miss. She and her “sister with a different mother,” Becky Ruth-Morris, showed up dressed in all black. Ruth-Morris has on a masquerade mask with a purple spider atop her head. And Guffey Miller is wearing an inner tube tu-tu with an inner tube sash. Her hat was made from a small inner tube attached to her father’s Navy hat.
“He was a photographer,” she said. “My mother was a docent at Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So I did grow up with art. But I didn’t really study art. I studied life.”
She has been working in tires for decades. Several of her pieces are playground sculptures. She houses treasure on her 35-acre wooded property that she and her late husband Mars Hall named Rising Oaks and the Wonderwood. Treasure in the sense that people say, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
“I am not afraid to get dirty, no,” she said of collecting materials. “I’m pretty clean today. Normally I’m pretty dirty.”
Maumelle High Student Cody Carlisle, sophomore, is taking his piece, “Industrialized Crow,” to the 2018 Arkansas Youth Artist Association Spring Competition in April.
He said he told people he had all three lunches because he would grab a hot pocket and work on the piece through all three periods. The process took 8 to 10 weeks and was his first time making a sculpture that wasn’t clay.
“I am extremely proud of how this turned out,” Carlisle said.
Campbell’s near-death-inspired work has a garden theme. The pieces are named after plants, “Arkansas Dawn Redwood” and “Arkansas Delta Yellow Picea.” He’s breathing life into the premonitions of death that troubled him after that day on an Atlanta highway.
Guffey Miller has her “Re-tired People” set up nearby on the second floor of the Capitol rotunda. The student’s works are there as well, with some on the third floor.
All of them together send the message: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
The art is on display through Friday, March 16.