Laura Keech Allen Kyle McLaughlin Laura LaRue, Mandy Keener

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Art has never been a single-minded pursuit for sculptor Kyle Boswell, a native of Bryant. Instead, he prefers melding his various interests together and working in a collaboratively creative environment to keep his own artistic fires burning. Kyle, who mixes blown-glass pieces with other materials, such as steel, copper, bamboo and textiles, has an amazing ability to make seemingly disparate objects work together with amazing results, which can be seen at Stephano’s Fine Art Gallery in Little Rock and Zian Fine Art in Rogers, as well as the March of Dimes 2007 Citizen of the Year award sculptures.

Creative expression has always been a part of Kyle’s life, thanks to his parents, Ted and Joyce Boswell, who are supporters of the arts, and a number of family members who are artists themselves. “I was a regular in the summer workshops and classes at the Arkansas Arts Center from the age of four, when I was cutting construction paper to make collages, until I was 17,” he says. Though he began his college career as an art student, after three years he decided to change his major to international affairs. He then spent time working in Washington D.C. and studying at the American University before relocating to Miami, where the drive to express himself creatively began to return.

“I took metal welding at the South Florida Art Center and glass blowing at the University of Miami,” Kyle says. “After one semester I was invited by the university to apply for resident artist status in the hot glass program, which I maintained for seven years.” As a resident artist, Kyle had the opportunity to study with many well-known artists and to be inspired by the work of the other artists creating alongside him. “Three-dimensional sculpture and the ceramics department were visible from the glass shop, and the bronze foundry was just next door,” he says. “That environment promotes growth for everyone.”

Throughout his residency, Kyle was challenged to exhibit several bodies of work and to demonstrate growth in his skill level, a requirement that led him to re-interpret a wide range of objects in glass, such as the plastic mop bucket in his studio. “For my Pails and Buckets series, I started by literally trying to reproduce the bucket in glass,” he says, “and then gradually began making much more organic and textural pieces.”

After seven years in Miami, Kyle is now in the process of relocating his studio to Bryant. “I’m located on the back of almost 200 acres of woodland owned by my family for several generations,” he says. He has big ideas for the space, especially with a new state-of-the-art glass furnace on its way from Portland, Oregon. While he awaits its arrival, he travels back and forth to Miami to blow glass, while completing assembly and steel welding in Bryant. Though it makes for a complicated schedule, it’s almost the best of both worlds for him. “The studio is away from everyone, which has so many benefits,” he says, “but I start to miss the university setting.”

Though Kyle exhibits regularly around the country, he also displays pieces in Bryant at his father’s law office, and for him, operating at both ends of the spectrum has always been the most rewarding. “For me, creating a piece of art always inspires the next one,” he says. “It comes from within.”