Pat Musick, sculptor, and painter, and Jerry Carr, her husband, former astronaut, and her engineer and business manager, will be featured at the Reboli Center for Art and History’s Third Friday event, July 20 from 6 – 8 PM.  Musick’s sculptures and paintings from her Nest and Our Fragile Home series are part of the current exhibit, Artistic Dimensions, at the Reboli Center.  The sculptural pieces are a collaboration between Pat and Jerry. She does the conceptual designs, and he does the engineering design for the support frames.  Pat supervises construction and does the finishing work.

Pat Musick has been making art since she was four years old.  Today, her pieces, both sculptural and works on paper, are in over a hundred public and private collections in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Her work is included in many prestigious art museums - Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Grounds for Sculpture, Arkansas Arts Center, and the Alexandria LA, Huntsville AL, and Albrecht-Kemper Museums. Through her work as both a painter and a sculptor, Pat seeks reconciliation between the forces that mankind exerts upon nature and the opposing forces that nature wields on our earth.  Her art offers a message of harmony, balance, and peace.

Pat is well known for her work depicting the plight of 15,000 Native Americans who made the infamous Trail of Tears march in the late 1830’s when they were displaced by the government from their Southeastern US homes to the Oklahoma Territory.  Two large-scale abstract sculptures inspired by this event are located on the main campus of the Tyson Food Corporation in Springdale, Arkansas and at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Her work is meditative, strong and serene. She is a devoted environmentalist, and this is reflected in her work. Musick and Carr are deeply concerned about our fragile planet and their collaborative work explores this theme.  Their artwork has synthesized Musick’s concern with the tension between man and the natural environment, and Carr’s galactic viewpoint. They share an insight that the Earth is fragile; the natural world is immensely beautiful; peace and harmony are integral to our well-being, and as humans, we need to be responsible caretakers.  Carr’s experience in outer space gave him the chance to see the earth in a perspective that moved him profoundly. He has been quoted as saying, “From a distance, you can see a little blue ‘fuzz’ surrounding the Earth, which is the atmosphere.  Comparing the earth with an apple, the atmosphere is as thin and fragile as the skin of an apple.  And that’s what protects us from everything. It brings up a lot of concern about the Earth.”  During an Earth Day Celebration at the United Nations in 1990, Col. Carr was one of 40 former astronauts and cosmonauts invited to attend.  Six of the flyers were asked to express in their own language how they felt when they looked down for the first time upon Earth from orbit.  Pat, who was in the audience, exclaimed afterward, “They all said the same thing!”