Pop art has come to Joplin with a force.

The Spiva Center for the Arts is featuring works by the world famous artist Andy Warhol along with five artists’ work in the currently running “Figuratively Speaking” exhibit.

Other artists loaning their works of art to the exhibit are Lavetta Rhinehart, Henry Moore, Marcie E. v. B. Gibbons and Sharon Bond Brown. The exhibit opened Jan. 16 with music by the Joplin High School Strolling Strings and food by Camille’s Sidewalk Café.

The Center is concurrently featuring another exhibit called “Go Figure: Works from the Region,” upstairs in the Regional Focus Gallery. Lara Blankenship, senior secondary art education major, and Katherine Chandler, senior studio art major, both have several pieces in the “Go Figure” exhibit.

Blankenship’s art focuses primarily on the use of faceless, shadowy figures to express universal themes of community and loneliness. Chandler produced a series of clay corset figures ranging from soft and feminine to harsh and cutting.

Jo Mueller, director of the center, thinks the famous artists help bring notoriety to the regional artists’ works.

“We had over 100 people visit the exhibit during the first weekend,” Mueller said. “The people are initially drawn by the Warhol name and when they get here they find so much more.”

The Center has the Warhol pieces on loan from the A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc. corporate art collection. The four loaned pieces are only one third of the corporate collection.

“A lot of galleries are happy to loan things to us,” Mueller said. “They usually want to know about facilities because of the environmental concerns about where the paintings will be kept.”

Many of the artists and galleries don’t charge the Center for borrowing the artwork, only for shipping and handling.

Warhol is famous for his depictions of celebrities and historic or political figures with strange collections of colors and design. He used commercial silkscreening techniques to create identical, mass produced images on canvas, then variations in color to give each print of an edition a different look. The works currently at the Center are a Van Heusen necktie advertisement featuring a young Ronald Reagan, a rare print of Uncle Sam with a background of diamond dust, and portraits of Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka.

Blankenship has worked for the Center for four years and said the community reaction to Warhol’s work has been mixed.

“One man said that it was hard for him to stand back and judge the Warhols because of his fame,” Blankenship said. “He said he couldn’t judge whether it was good or not or if he even liked it. Other people just bluntly said they didn’t like Warhol’s work, while others think it’s the best thing they’ve ever seen.”

The lesser-known Rhinehart is a native of Pierce City who uses 22-karat gold to paint nymphic Victorian females with large almond eyes. She mixes different elements like dried leaves and insects to produce her pieces.

Moore is famous for his semi-abstract reclining human figures. The small sculpture titled, “Reclining Figure Open Pose,” is on loan from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Gibbons works with handbuilt, lowfire clay to create whimsical sculptures that exaggerate the human form. Her figures have oversized feet, double faces, balloon-like bodies and swirling blackholes for mouths.

Brown produces nostalgic paintings based on photographs from her youth in a flat style that captures the age of the subjects. A Center representative drove to Denver to collect the paintings for the exhibit.

The next exhibit at the center is “Assemblage: Creating Art from Found Objects” and opens Feb. 27. The Spiva Center for the Arts is located at Third and Wall streets and is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday through Tuesday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday.