Last week, I spoke with artist James Surls about his artwork’s installation at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, located on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. The commission sits in a historically sensitive context. A Texas native, Surls noted previous disagreements with the former president’s policies, including being among thousands who signed the “Bush Step Down” petition published in the New York Times as an advertisement in 2006 by the activist group World Can’t Wait. Against that backdrop, the sculpture installed at the library seems to carry a tension between a devotion to civic cooperation and reservations about power. Yet, this tension doesn’t read partisan and instead seems to move toward reconciliation.
The Bush Center presents itself as “a nonpartisan institution advancing the timeless values of freedom, opportunity, accountability and compassion.” Its permanent exhibition includes replicas of key White House rooms like “The Situation Room” and currently features “Unity Through Sports,” which highlights civil rights history through athletics. The Center also hosts the policy-oriented Bush Institute, which in some areas breaks with contemporary Republican orthodoxy: It promotes constructive immigration reform, supports global aid partnerships and recently ran a media campaign for “civility” as a core democratic virtue. The Center doesn’t archive many of the Bush administration’s most controversial decisions, including disputes about the legitimacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the expansion of federal surveillance, but it also doesn’t appear to glorify or justify them. Instead, it reframes the former president’s legacy through broad values like economic growth, global health and international freedom, often with a cadence at odds with current party rhetoric.
For the library, Surls presented “Reflections,” a roughly 23-foot arrangement of dual-sided carved flowers emerging from a central steel mesh. The sculpture’s symmetrical composition means it can be approached from any angle. Surls remarked, “In essence you’re looking at the two sides of things, it’s a psychological mirror… based on the place where it’s going.” The work is made of over 90 cedar flower petals, all hand-carved by Surls using wood from his Texas land. From afar the petals appear uniform, but up close each is rugged and distinctly shaped with a hand axe into an organic topography.
Flowers, for Surls, function like fractals, or the swirl of hair on a baby’s crown. They are naturally occurring “patterns of growth” that serve as the vocabulary of his work. Their intensity bridges cosmological and emotional registers. Surls reflected, “If you’ve ever driven a car at night in a blizzard, it’s horrifying. Then you put your lights on bright and think, my god, it’s [everywhere]: it looks like a Monet lake, just covered in lily pads. You’re immersed.” This elusive rhythm of structures that feel both underlying and viscerally physical, guides the impact of “Reflections.”
Asked how an artist might take up historical responsibility or approach reconciliation, Surls refused to generalize a sensitive topic. He said he can only do it the way he knows how, which for him begins with wood. Borrowing from Will Rogers’ famous humanitarian line, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” Surls said he has never met a piece of wood he didn’t like. The relationship is direct for “Reflections” — the cedar came from a tree stripped by a tornado. All the wood is from a remnant trunk that was left standing bare, “like a telephone pole.” Surls admired the trunk’s survival and tenacity, which seemed able to hold the symbolic weight the institutional commission required.
Touching on the current political climate, Surls said we are “out of balance.” He said, “We’ve got to do what some call mid-course corrections, tweak the trajectory.” He avoided partisanship in his diagnosis. Instead, he focuses on deeper, fundamental structural imbalances. This perspective can be seen in recent sculptures, in which an installation of seemingly charred wood surrounds a viewer, with hidden tools sprouting from branches. These tools appear sometimes sharp and menacing. They move with the same natural growth patterns that animate his other work, but here the forms suggest an additional latent violence. To me, they ask whether a capacity for harm carries the promise of future destructive consequences. It’s a kind of Chekhov’s gun for ideological conflict: Must these hidden tools be used, or can the branches return to reaching without armament, toward the heavens?
Considering our precarious time of polarization, Surls’ alignment with the Bush Center reflects a persistent interest in reconciliation. He told me, “Regardless of whose institute it is, I consider it to be an honorable endeavor.” That endeavor, for him, is also personal and local. Speaking about partisan differences, he mentioned his brother, who sits firmly across the aisle. Surls said, “We grew up in the same house, he is a great father and a good man. I don’t agree with him. I can still check my guns at the door, so to speak.”
Both the installation and his relationship with his brother model a kind of armistice, a peace gesture, that feels rare and urgently needed right now.