A Superior History

It took 10 years, but Carl Gawboy has brought the history of Superior, WI, vividly to life.

Last month Gawboy, 60, unveiled the final group of panels in a sprawling mural of the port city's history at the Superior Public Library. It's no ordinary painting. Each panel is five- by seven feet. There are 33 panels, for an astounding total of 1,155 square feet of art. The mural has been universally praised in Superior, where in its decade-long evolution it has heightened public awareness of the town's history.

Gawboy, who is of Ojibwe and Finnish extraction, has been an instructor in St. Scholastica' s Indian Studies department since 1987. His artworks hang in several locations on campus.

"Officially I'm retired" from St. Scholastica, he said. "But I'm doing adjunct work and I assume that I'll keep doing that. I still enjoy it."

Nor does he plan to slow down his artistic schedule. This summer he will create a mural for the Cloquet Historical Society in anticipation of its centennial. Meanwhile, he often does smaller works at the same time as the big ones.

"Fortunately, I have a studio that's large enough to accommodate all the work. But it's not heated well so I got a pair of those Charles Dickens gloves with the fingers missing. During the hardest winter months I close up the studio and let it go cold. I mostly paint in the temperate months."

Gawboy has worked large before. He has a 75- by 4-foot mural at Bemidji State University, and has 4- by 8-footers at the Nett Lake tribal government center building and in Ely, MN's city hall. They're all based on historical themes.

The scale is a contrast to his small, more delicate watercolors.

"It's very 'in your face'," Gawboy said. "I use brighter colors and of course wider brushes -the scale of the tools goes up with the size."

The Superior Public Library project represented a challenge of perspective, he noted, because the bottom of each panel would be eight feet above the floor.

Then-librarian Paul Gaboriault first conceived of 15 panels.

"Then, almost the next week, he thought of 30," Gawboy recalled with a laugh.

The panels portray Superior from its "creation days" in Ojibwe lore through white contact, industrialization and into the 20th century. The panels are set above doorways and bookshelves in a continuous weave of color, wrapping the library in a shimmering strip of blues, golds, oranges and blacks. Gawboy is at once bold and abstract in his treatment of folklore, and painstakingly delicate in his renderings of factual detail.

The ideas for subject matter came in a few "brainstorming" meetings between Gawboy and the librarians, library supporters and local history fans.

"After that I was pretty much free to pursue it as I wanted," he said. "That was just a classic, ideal relationship between the patron and the artist. There was no control."

Not that the creative process went completely smoothly. At several points throughout the decade he spent on the project, he became discouraged and questioned why he had signed on for something so enormous.

"There are some panels that just would not work," he said ruefully. "If anyone ever decides to X-ray those they'll find so many altered images below what you see on the surface. Then others flowed as easily as could be, were just a pure pleasure to do."

The project was paid for by donations from local individuals and companies, primarily in the first half, and by grants, primarily in the second half, and was augmented throughout by the fundraising efforts of the Friends of Superior Public Library.

The first two panels were delivered and installed in '92. Through the years, as more and more panels have been unveiled, reaction has been consistently positive, he said. "There's always been a real enthusiasm for them," he said.

The most rewarding comment he heard?

"Early on, a remark I heard from a Superior resident was, 'Why didn't I learn all that stuff in school?' His reaction was, 'I'm seeing that Superior was where everything was happening, a crossroads of the fur trade, the industrial revolution, the transcontinental railroad, the shipping, the whaleback ships being invented here, celebrities coming to town.' This was all something he had no idea of.

"It felt good that suddenly he looked at, and felt, Superior as part of a bigger thing." The project also had a benefit Gawboy didn't foresee.

"It's my impression, and I've been told, that there are Indians going to the library now. That was the impression of one of the patrons of the library, and it was confirmed by me when I started looking for Indian people there. Any time I stop over, I see a family looking at books or whatever. If that's true, wow! What a thing that is! To make Indian people feel comfortable there. It made the library their place just like it's everybody else's place."