Rural Murals in Dairyland

Wisconsin motorists may never see a purple cow, but they are rubbernecking at an enormous piebald blue one emblazoned on Farmer Hilbert Schneider's 75-year-old barn at Johnson Creek, 34 miles east of Madison on Interstate 94. The blue cow, shown fullface, peers out from a halo of stars, sunbursts and corn stalks in a dazzling 1,530-sq.-ft. mural.

A giant new wrinkle in billboard advertising? An acid-age hex sign? No indeed. The Bunyanesque bovine is part of a statewide barn-painting project, Dairyland Graphics, dreamed up by the Wisconsin Arts Board under a $32,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Its purpose: to bring art to the countryside--and also bring forth the creative talents of local teenagers. "We wanted to give rural children a chance to use their imaginations," says Arts Board Executive Director Jerrold Rouby, "the same way urban mural programs have got ghetto kids involved in art." In two years some 300 youngsters, working under professional artists-in-residence, have taken up paintbrushes.

The twelve murals they have painted are vivid, unabashed celebrations of rural Wisconsin life. On Ken Howell's dairy barn near Ashland, an ore boat steams across the clapboard siding, while an orange and crimson sun descends in a peacock blue sky. At Oak Creek, a 16-ft. cultivator depicted on the John and Arthur Mahr barn stands amid a luminous crazy quilt of rolling hillsides. Past poster-bright stands of timber and grazing deer, a lumber train with trim red wheels chugs across the Lewis Furchtenicht barn in Spooner. The facade of Patrick Hennessey's barn in Dodgeville displays primary-hued portraits of archetypal Wisconsinites: a blue-faced farmer, a crimson-haired girl, a gray-and-white-faced iron miner, a green-visaged businessman chomping a blue cigar.

No Nudes. Some of the farmers who owned the barns balked at first. "They wanted to be sure we wouldn't have any nudes or anything," says Cindy Brennan, 18, who worked on the Hennessey bright barn of portraits. With the farmer won over, the whole community would pitch in with the spirit of a pioneer barn raising. Local merchants contributed paintbrushes, rollers, tarps and scaffolding. Adult volunteers provided transportation and meals. Pittsburgh Plate Glass and Sears, Roebuck supplied the paint. As many as 15 to 25 teen-agers helped plot the design, scaled it up on the barn wall and daubed in the pigments. It was "like painting in a giant coloring book," says Kelly Zeiman, 16.

The rural mural program has brought praise from all sides. Kenneth Ray, assistant art professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, likens the paintings to "an outdoor museum." Governor Patrick Lucey sees the inspiration for "other projects that blend art with life." The kids are delighted, of course. "My folks were real proud of me," says Nick Folley, 16, who worked on the blue cow. With no mural to paint, "I would have sat around and done nothing, I suppose," he says. Meanwhile, Rouby has been getting inquiries from all over the country on how to start up similar ventures. Says Rouby: "All we did was set up a pilot program to see if it would work. Well, it did."

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