Jo Mueller, director of Spiva Center for the Arts Globe/Roger Nomer

In some of her former lives, Jo Mueller helped put on an international film festival, attended dental school and traded handmade cowboy shirts for medical care.

As she prepares to celebrate her fourth year as director of the George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in September, Mueller laughs as she recalls how for the first year and a half she was pretty sure the Spiva board had made a mistake by choosing her to fill the spot vacated by Darlene Brown, director for eight years before Mueller took the position.

But now she says she and others can see how the Joplin gallery and center for art classes and events has positively impacted her life in many ways.

“Sometimes I would sneak down into the gallery after everyone else had left for the day, just to be there,” Mueller said of her early days at Spiva. “I’m very grateful for where I am. It’s been terrific, and it’s been hard.”

A natural importance

A Joplin native, Mueller said she grew up within walking distance of the old Spiva building at Fourth Street and Sergeant Avenue.
Mueller’s mother signed her up for an oil painting class at Spiva when she was young and she says she still carries something about that experience with her today at the age of 57.

“It has something to do with why I’m here now,” she said. “Something about it just stuck with me. Those afternoons with the oil paints and the way the sun came in through the windows.”

There were many people in her life who Mueller says helped emphasize the importance of the arts to her. Her mother used to take rolls of old wallpaper out on rainy days and let Mueller finger paint on the back of the thick paper. Her father, she says, taught her to exquisitely wrap Christmas presents, taking pride with every crease and bow.

“I remember one summer my parents painted the house, and I wasn’t allowed to help because I was probably 6 or 7 years old,” she said. “But I convinced my mom to let me take a bucket of water and a small paint brush and climb this tree we had and paint all the leaves with the water, just to make them shiny.

“Art was just something you did, it just came out of you,” Mueller said. “All the arts had a natural importance to me.”

After high school, Mueller attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, just long enough to do an internship at a Boston children’s psychiatric hospital and learn there was a great need for people who wanted to change the world.

She joined the hippie movement, attended Woodstock, moved to Colorado and worked her way through several nonprofit art organizations including Colorado Contemporary Dance, the Denver International Film Festival and the Denver Center Theater Company.

Mueller says she burned herself out on nonprofit organizations by working 18 hour days, and decided to become a dentist. Even now she laughs about her sudden decision so many years ago to completely change her life. Mueller says she has always been mechanically inclined and liked the idea of a dentist’s tiny tools. When she met a young friend preparing for dental school, she decided she could do it, too.

She took the test, was accepted and finished a difficult and expensive first year of dental school. But Mueller said she was having dreams at night of being a dentist with a mobile treatment van, traveling to South America and holding free clinics for the native children.

“I realized I wasn’t going to change my life. That even as a dentist, I was still going to be doing it nonprofit,” she said.

So Mueller left dental school and took a hodge-podge of classes in Seattle, Wash. For one project, she focused on the art car movement, where people elaborately decorated their cars with various objects and themes. Her resulting presentation was such a success, she presented it at an art symposium, gathering community members and the artists together. It was her first taste of what would eventually lead her to her current position at Spiva.

“It was getting people excited about things they’ve never been excited about before,” she said.

More than just walls

Mueller got married, graduated from Colorado Christian University with a degree in organizational management, and spent some time running bed and breakfasts before moving back to Joplin in 1999. She said she didn’t consider herself an artist at the time, but almost by accident took a pottery class at Missouri Southern State University. She has never been the same since.

“I was completely sucked in by it,” Mueller said.

Somehow, Mueller said she screwed up her courage the next summer and applied at Silver Dollar City as an apprentice potter. She laughed again, rubbing her forehead as she talks about that very difficult summer where she learned her art in front of thousands of visitors every day.

When the job at Spiva opened up, Mueller said she was working at the Joplin Public Library’s reference desk, and purposely ignored the job ad.

She knew enough about the position to know it would change her life once again if she got it. But with the help of her generous family, Mueller says she stepped into the director’s position in September 2003.

Mueller has taken pieces of her life and, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, artists and donors, is slowly transporting Spiva into the consciousness of Southwest Missouri residents.

“I had a feeling that Spiva could be more to this community than just these walls,” she said. “I just had a feel for what I wanted Spiva to be. I wanted it to be a place where anybody can be and feel welcome. I hope people who haven’t been here in a while don’t come expecting some kind of stuffy place. Because they won’t find it.”

One of Mueller’s major goals in her position is to give area children that same chance to experience the magic of the arts like she did years ago. Through a variety of classes and programs, more than 700 elementary students come through Spiva’s doors each year.

“If kids have a chance to experience the arts, to look at things in a different way, it opens them up in a new way,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you turn out to be, because you’re going to turn into a creative problem solver.

“I think the arts are pretty darn vital,” she said. “It’s invaluable.”

As for Mueller’s journey, it has been both painful and wonderful. Looking back, she is amazed at the complexity and beauty of life, even when she was completely unaware of it. She smiles easily as she reminisces over her past, and says whatever is in her future, she will always love the feeling of standing up at every Spiva opening night and saying, “Thank you.”

“I guess this place has been good for me,” Mueller said with a grin.


George A. Spiva Center for the Arts
222 W. 3rd Street
Joplin, Mo 64801
Tel: 417-623-0183
Fax: 417-623-3805
www.spivaarts.org