Now in its third year, the Creative Exchange Fund, administered by The Medium in downtown Springdale, supports local artists by providing financial support and a space to take creative risks. KUAF is partnering with The Medium to profile some of this year's 37 multidisciplinary artists. We'll hear about their art, their process, and what it means to be a creative in Northwest Arkansas right now.
This Friday, artist and musician Three Dead Idols, or Tyler Bolden, will be performing live at The Medium as part of an exhibition of his work with the Exchange Fund. Originally from Little Rock, now based in Fayetteville, he says he's been interested in art throughout his life.
Bolden: I've always liked being able to express myself in a different way besides words. So that's why I paint often. I try to always be on a certain wavelength when I wake up. So it's certain things that I do that put me in a certain mind that when I do music, it means something. Because that's what really got me into making music here recently.
A lot of the music that I hear, I don't know, it seems not there. It seems like something is in the middle of the bridge between seeing an artist or being an artist and being on a social media screen. That line is very vague now, and that's why music is very important. That's why art is very important. Because there are so many ways that you can express yourself thoroughly, through your skin and your bones. You just pour art outside of yourself. That's more important to me than being on social media.
This Medium thing is great and it's beautiful. I'm using that to really expand the brand outside of just music, outside of just art. Because once you're multifaceted and you have all these different platforms, it's hard to put you in a box. It's difficult to say rapper or artist or painter, and all these things are true, mind you. But as far as me presenting this to a community that has never really understood what hip hop was or certain art techniques—like I didn't go to school for art, even though I went to the University of Arkansas—this is a really good accomplishment in my mind. But I'm still chasing something, or trying to define something for a person or a group of people that might not understand fully what it means to be an artist or a Black man in America, or rapping these things and saying these things because they're true to me.
Everything, everyone else plays it as a facade in a sense. Like how you dress is very expressive, how you feel of the day. People tend to take that some type of way when I'm walking down the street. And it's not on purpose. I'm not blaming anyone or any of these things, but it's a whole different—because they've never understood how it meant to be looked at in that sense of music.
That Arkansas in general doesn't have a large act isn’t beyond me. You can say Johnny Cash 50 years ago. You can say all these things 30 years ago. Right now, who can you pull up on Google that is a large act? You can't pull up one. And that's true. We have to put these local people on. I support all these local artists. It's a beautiful scene to me. The fact that all these bands here on these walls have really put in something, but the city or the state or the whole force of it is not behind the artist.
I was talking to one of my producer homies in LA. He said that's what's so different, because he's on the outside looking in. I flew out there with my homie Mateo to get a whole different perspective. But he's like, the infrastructure is not there. There are so many talented artists, but the amount of venues, the amount of people who want to see these shows, the amount of people who are into different types of music, the way people view Arkansas in general when it comes to music or art—all that matters when you're perceived on a national scale, or a global scale, or even a local scale. That's why pushing these things is very important.
I'm very passionate about these things. I know it might sound long-winded or destructive in a way, or like I'm trying to be demeaning or narcissistic, but that's why I won the grant—because I see things a certain way. People need to understand that I'm not being aggressive, I'm not trying to be provocative. That's just how I grew up. And it's not an excuse of how I grew up at all. No, not an excuse.
There are four or five canvases that I'm working on right now, and they're huge. They're 50 by 50 inches, about 5 feet by 5 feet. I'm doing five of those. I'm using modern newspaper clippings, and I'm also painting and spray painting on them. They're all multimedia canvases with textures. They're playing out these news headlines on top of art that I've made previously. It's all a collage of my life art and past art. I'm collaborating with other artists in Northwest Arkansas.
It's very modern. All these things happened like two months ago. These headlines aren't old, and people tend to blur over that. I think that's dismissive. We're grieving every day on our phones, literally, about something that happened overseas or something that happened in our backyard, or at Devil's Den or whatever. We're always grieving. Humans weren't meant to grieve 24/7. That's a lot to put on a person every day. Even though it's subconscious, your body goes through grief cycles while you're seeing this. That's why you pause for a second and look at it. It's almost like trauma. You're subjecting yourself to trauma every day.
A lot of art, a lot of music, a lot of digesting, and seeing my perspective through all of this.
Three Dead Idols will be hosting a performance and exhibition at The Medium in Springdale on Friday, Oct. 3. You can follow Tyler's work on Instagram at @3deadidols, the number three. The Creative Exchange series is produced by KUAF Public Radio in partnership with The Medium. Support for this project comes from the Tyson Family Foundation. The Medium and the Creative Exchange Fund are projects of the Creative Arkansas Community Hub and Exchange, or CACHE. For more about this project and the 2025 recipients, you can visit themedium.com.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
