"Controlled Demo" is the latest exhibit from artist and musician Sam King. The collection of abstract paintings goes on display at the Creamery in Rogers later this month. King, who is also an associate dean in the University of Arkansas School of Art, spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth about the exhibition, his process and the importance of place in artmaking and consumption.
Daniel Caruth: And so, Sam, thanks for being here today. Thanks for talking to us. You've got a show, a solo exhibition coming up at the Creamery in October. Can you tell me a little bit about that, about how it came together and just sort of what people can expect?
Sam King: Sure. Yeah. I'm familiar with the Creamery for the last several years. I know the person that programs it, Reilley Dickens-Hoffman. He was a graduate student at the University of Arkansas a few years ago, and he developed a relationship in the last several years with Ecological Design Group, who is also in that building and who kind of runs the whole thing.
This section of the building is a mostly unreconstructed space that really was a creamery that historically has been there for many, many years. And so it has a kind of raw quality that for me personally was reminiscent of a DIY space I ran for several years called La La Land. I would say maybe the only other space in the region right now that kind of has that quality is the garage at Likewise, where you get a sense of the building having a bit of age, character, history.
I felt like that kind of space could provide an interesting contrast or complement to the paintings that I make.
Caruth: Well, can you talk a little bit about the paintings for this show? Because it definitely has that DIY element. I was able to look at just some of the ones that you have up, like on your social media and stuff, and to see, you know, I think it definitely lends itself to what that space looks like and sort of your background in DIY and with your music as well.
King: Yeah. I think that, well, in that realm of music and I guess event production, there's a kind of scrappiness. You’re more likely to see the seams of the thing. And I've always liked that. And I think that over time that has bled into the aesthetic statement that my work makes.
The works are pretty collage driven. They're not always produced through collage, but they are made by working and reworking and then getting to a certain point where they might come off the stretchers, get cut up, get spread across several new canvases.
I think that willingness to break things down and put them back together — probably there's an energy that's similar. And also, like I said, once I've cut them up, it's not just the fronts that I'm using again. I'm using the sides. I'm using the backs. So there's staple holes and fingerprints and all that kind of stuff from the handling of the painting in an earlier state.
Caruth: And for you, I mean, doing it that way, how do you know when a piece is done? How do you know when this is going to be the finished product that will go in front of someone?
King: Yeah. My pat answer for that is when I want to keep working on it but there's nothing to do. So that means it's doing something. It has a draw power. Something about it is intriguing. But then anything that I would do additionally would disrupt whatever that thing is.
Disruption is generally useful to the work — that's how it proceeds. But then at a certain point, you hit a kind of equilibrium or arrive in a territory that feels unfamiliar or new. And that's usually a good reason to stop and put that energy on another one.
Caruth: Yeah. And for shows like this, I mean, you have lots of paintings, lots of pieces that you're pulling from different places. How do you decide, “OK, this is the show that I'm going to put together and these are the pieces that are going to go in it”? Especially if you're pulling maybe from older pieces or things that you're coming back to.
King: Oh, well, these are all, I would say, they've all been at least worked on in 2025. They may have started earlier, but I think they are of this year in a way that kind of unites them in how they're being solved. It is important for me for each painting to kind of make its own case. But I think right now some of the resolutions that I'm finding are relatable to one another.
In terms of which things to use, some of it's a question of scale. I should have some bigger ones, I should have some smaller ones — just a sense of overall balance. But also how those scale choices will play in that particular room with a particular square footage. And I'm going to try to be relying mostly on the natural light of the space. So I'll have to be strategic about placement.
Caruth: You care a lot about local galleries and about people being able to show art around and caring about this community and about this city. Why should people go out to smaller exhibitions and engage with local galleries and local artists?
King: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing. Permit me a little trip here, but I'm a lifelong music lover, musician. I've been to a lot of shows, I've booked shows, I've played shows, and I could probably count the number of arena-tier concerts that I've been to on one hand. That part of it has never drawn me in so much.
I think one of the things that's special about smaller-scale events, more community or regional events, is that it's more a reflection of a particular place. I certainly went to school at a time where to call something “regionalist” or “regional art” was sort of a pejorative. But if you think about how increasingly flattened out American culture is — because of our media, our many media platforms — accents are kind of disappearing, this kind of thing.
So it's a moment to see what's happening where you live, to see how people express themselves where you live, and perhaps to be a more active participant, even as just a spectator or consumer. It means something different when it's smaller scale or regional, because if I'm going to say my work is about some specific Arkansas thing, there are people around here who would be able to say, “No, it's not,” or, “I don't get it.” There's a kind of accountability in the creativity that's present.
For me, there's something about leaving behind this sense that the real thing is elsewhere. I think that's something that in a region like Arkansas, that temptation to believe that is here, because you're reading about things or watching things and your movies are getting made in another state. Your news is getting printed, a lot of it, in other states. The sports you watch, if it's professional tier, they're not Arkansas teams. So there is this temptation to feel like life is happening elsewhere in a different kind of way.
I think it's a choice you have to make — to respond sincerely to the conditions of your real, everyday life.
Caruth: And I know we talked a little bit about it at the beginning, but can you talk about how you came up with the title to the show?
King: Oh, Controlled Demo. Yeah. Well, in the statement for the show, I do something I don't normally do. I invoke something that is historically verified or specific. Because the work is abstract, if I make too many claims toward specificity with the work, the justification falls apart kind of quickly.
But I decided to talk about, you know, a couple years ago this was reported — they're widening AR 112 and they run up on this site that could be as old as 9,000 years old. It was probably a kind of dining hall with some either dwelling units or gathering units. It probably could have supported 50 people, something like this. Somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 years old. It's the oldest site that's clear evidence of human occupation of this region that we're aware of.
Some people came in and looked at it — anthropologists from Memphis came over, gathered up a bunch of stuff, and took it back to Memphis. Because we're not keeping it. We're just going to get rid of it so that we can widen the road.
I don't care to get into the specificities and the justifications for it, because I'm sure somebody has a reason, and I'm not informed enough to critique the choice. But I am informed enough, as a person who feels wonder when I'm confronted with things that old, to feel sad that we can't keep it. It has the power to tell us something about this place that we wouldn't have had without it. We'll have some little version of it, I guess, in what was archived.
Having taught a couple times for UA over in Rome at the UA Rome Center, any development in Rome takes forever because they can't dig three feet without finding something historically significant. They do preserve a lot of it. They still make their subway or whatever eventually, but that sense that this is important and we should preserve it — how do you hit that critical mass of feeling that way? How do you build that momentum?
It's something that struck me, and I felt it was a kind of quotidian example of what it feels like to make the work I make. Even though it's abstract work, that question of what gets to stay, who gets to stay — that's a powerful question. The power and danger of abstraction is exactly that: if you can simplify something to a basic value, a zero or one, then you decide whether it belongs or doesn't belong, or it's part of the history or it isn't. That's a product of our capacity for abstraction. The truth is that “belong” is a word. A “borderline” is a concept we all agree on.
Caruth: Is that when you were in Rome, is that when that idea connected? Did it click being around that?
King: I think it was kind of a slow burn. The first few times I was in Rome, I got to be there as a student as well. You have to get past just the overwhelming — it's truly overwhelming. And then increasingly there's this kind of Disneyland aspect to it because it's such a tourism hub. You're crawling over people just to see things.
But once you get past that, the kind of wonder at how much has happened over time, and what it is as a hub of power at different stages in history, comes through. It's also a self-cannibalizing city. Famously, there was a pope, when the church was really the dominant sort of government of the city, who wanted to quarry the Colosseum to build something else. His people had to kind of say, “Maybe not, maybe let's not do that.”
But he did a bunch of other things to make the city more navigable for pilgrims making pilgrimages, which kind of prefigures all this tourism now. You can't call it a pilgrimage for most people, but Sixtus V’s decisions about moving columns to make churches more recognizable — people are still using that wayfinding.
Caruth: All right. Well, now the fun part. What are the dates that people need to know for this exhibit?
King: Sure. The reception is Oct. 19, in the afternoon from 2 to 5 p.m., and then there are open hours on either side of that — the Friday and Saturday before and the Friday and Saturday after.
There is a live music event programmed for Oct. 20, so the work will be up but it'll be in the evening. The lighting conditions will be different, but it might still be worth a look. Definitely worth checking out the music. Atlas Maior is the project that'll be playing. It's an out-of-town group.
There's also an open house for Ecological Design Group that will coincide with the work being up. I believe that's on Oct. 23.
I just want to say thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. It's never easy to talk about visual work on the air, but I would invite anybody in the region to come check it out and hang out.
Sam King is a Fayetteville-based artist and musician. His latest exhibit, Controlled Demo, will have an opening reception at the Creamery on Birch Street in Rogers on Friday, Oct. 19, beginning at 2 p.m. He spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth inside the Karen Taha News Studio.
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