JCCC’s Kansas Studies Institute presents a public premiere of Moon Tosser of the Prairie, a documentary about Mullinville folk artist M.T. Liggett, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 21, in the Hudson Auditorium on the second floor of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. The event is free and open to the public.

Written and produced by JCCC faculty and staff, the 30-minute film takes an in-depth look at the metal sculptor who uses scrap farm equipment as his media, a cutting torch and arc welder as his tools.

The subject of previous television interviews and newspaper articles, Liggett is often portrayed as an eccentric right-wing conservative. His roadside collection from the 1990s trashes the Kansas Board of Education, Clinton Administration and Janet Reno. Dig deeper, and one finds his art is bipartisan.

“When you look at his art, he is as hard on conservatives as he is on liberals,” said Dr. James Leiker, director, the Kansas Studies Institute at JCCC. “His art is polemic, designed to provoke a response and touch people’s political nerves.”

Leiker said the goal of this documentary is to take more than a superficial look at the 79-year-old artist.

“When you just drive by and look at the art, it’s easy to dismiss it as weird and wacky, but when you get below the surface there is something a lot deeper there,” Leiker said. “M.T. appears to be a rural eccentric, but he’s been all over the world in the military and is well read in politics, philosophy and law.”

The genesis of the documentary was two JCCC Kansas tours, which visited Liggett to view his metals signs, windmills and gyros lining Mullinville, a city between Dodge City and Pratt.

Two of the tour participants became the “movers and shakers” of the documentary. Martha Varzaly, adjunct associate professor, English, is the scriptwriter; Bob Epp, adjunct associate professor, desktop publishing, the filmmaker. The film’s advisers are Leiker; Allison Smith, associate professor, art history; and Larry Meeker, JCCC Foundation board member and Liggett friend.

The documentary has been a year in the making, filming first-person interviews with Liggett at his studio and Meeker’s home in Lake Quivira. Epp also interviewed Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, which has six Liggett pieces on display. Liggett and the JCCC group have become friends, Liggett creating totems of Smith, Epp and Meeker.