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4I wasn%u2019t alone, because a recent exhibition of %u201cKalifornia Kulture%u201d played well to sold-out museum visitors all across the country. Even in southern Indiana, I was caught up in the surfing and hot-rod craze. But I knew one thing for sure. I needed to get out of there to find those like-minded custom hot rodders. And that%u2019s when it happened%u2014I was given my first mini-bike. From then on, until I turned sixteen, I rode the back roads, along rolling red-clay hills, with a new sense of freedom. I thought, if only Daniel Boone, or his brother Squire, had one of these babies.Other events occurred, along my path to puberty, that aroused my interest in both art and transportation. My parents took me to the Lanesville Air Show where (on a grass landing strip) I saw my first bi-wing stunt plane. Highway I-64 made travel to Louisville faster%u2014but not as much fun as traveling down the hilly Floyds Knobs. Then, one day my brother returned home on leave, and purchased a new 1965 Mustang convertible. Wow! That was enough to send me into fantasy-filled dreams of travel all across America. After getting out of the Navy, he topped it with a 1968 Corvette! It was official. I would spend all my waking hours emulating that standard of chrome and speed.After a succession of bicycles, mini-bikes, and motorcycles, my first car (a 1970 Monte Carlo) took me to the big city of Louisville where I%u2019d cruise Fourth Street and the Frisch%u2019s Big Boy Drive-In. As I turned 18, I visited my first museum in that car%u2014the J.B. Speed Art Museum. My abilities in drawing, and looking at the objects in that museum, gave me insight into other things that would be more important than acquiring custom wheels. Art became my salvation, and I put on hold the idea of driving a souped up, chromeladen, cam-thumping street rod. For me, maximum velocity would be achieved though painting, drawing, and studies in Art history. Freedom would come from that inalienable right of the artist to exercise a sense of creativity inspired by the world.I left home for the capital city of Indianapolis to attend Butler University, then came back south%u2014to Indiana University Southeast in New Albany. There, I rekindled my love for art%u2014and road-trips with friends and relatives back and forth to IU Bloomington. Ultimately, my first car would take me to Elkhart, where I live and work today.My love of the ocean had not waned when I first saw Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes. I would exclaim that it was like a great inland sea, to the chuckles of those who knew it well. My sense that this place was magical was enhanced when I saw the paintings of Frank Dudley. His works, like those illustrations in the old books I saw so long ago, fired my imagination about the world, as well as the great diversity of Indiana. I traveled through Brown County and encountered the work of other early Indiana painters. I rediscovered my home state though the vision of those, and other, American artists. Paintings by Edward Hopper and black-&-white photographs by artists like Walker Evans invigorated my memories of things past, things changed. The subjects in those paintings and photographs seemed universal, yet familiar%u2014much like the images of John Bower. They are universal because the artist extracts that imaginative part of the subject to give us an opportunity to exercise our memories and view them as extraordinary.I traveled from Corydon, at one end of Indiana, to the very edge of Michigan, and Elkhart became my home. Elkhart was not as exotic as California but it was close to Chicago. I soon began to discover its great history as a transportation hub for the railroad, and its manufacturing of %u201cmobile%u201d homes. Most importantly, I would discover a place that would become my primary professional residence%u2014the Midwest Museum of American Art. My studies in art delivered me to a locale I have called home for over 27 years. It has become a destination point, after many long journeys elsewhere, as my wife Lisa and I continue to travel by trains, planes, and automobiles%u2014always applying an artistic eye, and an imaginative outlook that originated on those first trips in that %u201861 Buick. For us, Indiana (like John%u2019s photography), seems as exotic as many far-off places, because we call it home.Brian ByrnCurator of Exhibitions & EducationMidwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IndianaDecember 2009