In spring of 2024, more than a dozen tornadoes devastated Rogers and surrounding communities. Northwest Arkansas came together to support neighbors during the immediate aftermath. But how were people supposed to cope with the long-term effects of being a victim of a natural disaster?
Artist Tom Flynn and Michael Panzer attempted to help people do just that with their sculpture Tornado Town. Flynn and Panzer worked together collecting debris after the storm, then fashioning hundreds of primarily trampoline springs into a nearly 500-pound model of a tornado over a miniature Rogers.
Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis did a story about the artwork back in 2024. Now, he’s gotten in contact with Flynn and Pantzer once more to discuss their similar and differing opinions on what to do with the piece.
After touring around the region, Tornado Town had its last showing at the Alexander Gallery at the Porter Arts Warehouse in Fayetteville. Now its fate is undecided.
Jack Travis: Well, so what’s its future? What’s the future of Tornado Town?
Tom Flynn: Well, there we would probably disagree.
Michael Pantzer: The recycling yard.
Flynn: Yeah. I don’t want it back in my shop, basically, because I have another big project that I’m doing for the city of Rogers, and I really just don’t have room. And I feel it has lived its life. It got a lot of press. I think it brought a lot of attention to it. And to me, I like that. It didn’t sell, and I’m fine with that. I don’t make my art to sell.
I think we’re artists all in different ways, but everybody’s an artist, and we’re all creative. And it was something that I think Michael and I knew we had to do, and we did it. And it was not easy. It took a lot. Just the engineering of getting it cantilevered on that base and getting that shape — the sort of sexy tornado shape instead of the big, fat tornado shape — was really difficult. We had no idea trampoline springs would be that hard to weld.
But it has lived its life, and I’m ready to go on and do other things. And there’s also an expense with it. Every time we move it somewhere, we either have to rent or borrow a trailer and sometimes hire help.
Pantzer: So we both agreed it’s not going to go back in the shop in the form it has been for a long time. I feel it conveys such an important message. Number one, it captures an historic severe weather event which happened to the city of Rogers. But we possibly will face more severe weather events in our area, mainly tornadoes. And I think the sculpture also sends a message for people to think about their future.
I feel the sculpture deserves to be somewhere where people walk by and hopefully it stops them in their daily track and they have a few thoughts about what it was, what it symbolizes, and what it means to our future of living with the possibility of severe weather events.
Travis: So you hope someone offers it a permanent home?
Pantzer: Yes. That’s what we’re still hoping. It’s basically days away from being scrapped. It’s going to be picked up the second week in January from the Alexander Gallery in downtown Fayetteville. And if there’s no offer of a permanent home, then we’re literally going to scrap it on the trailer.
We’re hauling it back to Tom’s shop, and it’s going to be laying outside in pieces.
Flynn: So there are things that will happen, like I call it my tornado town team, which is Michael, myself, and then we’ve got a couple others that have helped put it up and take it down the last few times.
And what’s going to happen is the frame is going to a sawmill, and they’re going to use that to cart around wood, and then the water tower I’m going to try to donate to the Rogers Water Company, and then the little houses that are on it, and the little church, I think they can go to the My Tornado Town volunteers.
And so there will always be a reminder.
Travis: But even past those small mementos, it did live a life like you said. You got a lot of press. I saw y’all pop up all over town.
Flynn: Yeah, we did, and I loved it. And I was pretty amazed at, I think one of the things I learned — I learned a lot of things with this, making a bigger sculpture like this — but one of them was how to write a good press release.
Which is, there are things I think right now I have the same the same tornado town volunteers I consider mentors or mentees, and I’m helping all of them with — I’ve got one that, he’s extremely dyslexic, but he’s a really good artist, but he can’t get a resume, stuff like that. So I’m helping him with that.
I have another that he’s just getting started in it, but he’s extremely creative. He’s one of my students at Eureka Springs. And I’ve got Michael, you know, Michael and I have learned a lot doing this together.
So this is a new thing to me to be able to mentor, and I’m really honored that anyone would listen to anything I had to say. But much, much less consider me a teacher.
Pantzer: Yeah. I mean, before the tornado hit Rogers and Memorial Day, we only met once at an art event and just had a few words of exchange. After the tornado hit Rogers, I had the idea of making, like, a memorial type of a sculpture, and I worked mainly with wood, so I wanted to be out of steel so it could be outside.
And so I called Tom and he said, you know, I had the same idea. And that brought us together. And we through the process, we formed a friendship.
Over 500 hours are into that sculpture. And we had many — we discussed many problems with both coming from an engineering background. So our discussions have been always very factual.
And that’s where we realized we actually get along real good when it comes to solving problems and having opinions about things. And all the discussions have been peaceful. And so that’s a really a a friendship I have with Tom. I appreciate a lot.
And it will be a lifetime memory that we did this together.
Travis: And it’s a friendship that sounds like it’s grown into a community.
Flynn: It has really? Yeah. I had someone tell me once that I formed community wherever I go. I think, you know, my — I used to be a Benedictine monk. And, you know, they were very communal.
That was a part of what you did is you took your vows to the other members like you would take a vow to be married. And so community and communication are important to me.
And I really hope in the next few years I can found or get started on some sort of a group of metal sculptors that meet once every once in a while,
Jack Travis: Some sort of club?
Flynn: Yeah. Club. A club would be a good name for it.
Travis: So just one more time, even if it does go to the scrapyard, it’s not dying. It’s going to live on through these small mementos, through the community that you’ve built.
But what do you hope the people that did get to interact with it in its original form, what do you hope they take away from it?
Flynn: All of my sculptures. One of my goals is for you to see that not everything is what it is when you first look at it.
A good example is my centipedes that are made out of two garden rakes, but they’re welded together and then twisted so they look like a big bug.
And the goal with that piece usually is to make you see, wow, that’s creepy bug. But at the same time. Oh, that’s made just from two, two garden rakes.
And I think this the the the tornado sculpture wall, I think it, you know, it is the reminder of, you know, the weather and everything else. I think it’s also a reminder what I liked going to Alexander Gallery and people seeing it is they’d see it and they’d see the big tornado and they’d get that purpose of of, you know, that feeling of, you know, you sort of have to walk under it to really see it.
But once you walk under it, then you’re like, oh, this is made out of trampoline springs. Yeah. Oh, there’s a whole bunch of little trampolines all over it.
And it is that continued discovery of that? There’s more. The more you look, the more you’ll see.
Pantzer: Yeah, there’s a lot of details on the sculpture.
I mean, the other thing is also that there’s actually a term called disaster fatigue. And it’s actually on the FEMA website.
That, you know, people who have gone through severe weather events in their life was threatened or their home was taken, or they had severe damage to their home. It’s so much internal stress which will be with you for a long time.
And then after the severe weather event, people or victims of, in our case, a tornado, have to make so many decisions in their lives because their lives have been completely changed.
But because they had this frightening, stressful event, it’s for them harder to make decisions, you know, moving forward. And they have to. There’s not like, well, I’m going to think about it. In half a year I’ll make a decision. They have to make decisions now.
And that’s why it’s actually that term disaster fatigue is actually on the FEMA website.
So we that’s another thing where we were hoping, OK, you know, there’s people come together and on the sculpture and they’ll talk about their scary experiences. And hopefully that will be a part of their healing process.
That was Michael Pantzer and Tom Flynn speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis about their sculpture, "Tornado Town." You can visit kuaf.com for pictures of the sculpture, Jack’s original story about it, and ways to contact Flynn and Pantzer. Their conversation was recorded in the Firman Garner Performance Studio at KUAF.
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.
