Bob Ross, the warmhearted, fuzzy-haired PBS television artist who died in 1995, is still a crowd-pleaser. No wonder North Carolina Wesleyan University is mounting a second exhibition of the Florida native’s work, Bob Ross: Bringing Back the Joy. Running from December 2 to January 13 in Rocky Mount, it features seventy-six canvases, some from his program, The Joy of Painting. Last year, seventy-six other Ross oil paintings, then the largest number of his works ever exhibited, attracted eleven thousand visitors from as far away as Australia. “People told us he changed their lives,” says Sheila Martin, executive director of the university’s Dunn Center. “The stories were just unbelievable, how they loved this man.” This time, the center will also stream Ross’s shows, host painting classes, and stage a Bob Ross musical. The landscapes and seascapes—the artist’s specialties—are on loan without cost from Bob Ross Inc. Joan Kowalski, whose parents started the business with Ross, says he was as kind and goofy as he appeared during the show’s thirty-one complete seasons (he died just before production of the thirty-second). “He knew that he was sort of a country boy, and he was in on the joke, too.”
Southern Agenda
Happy Little Trees
Illustration: Tim Bower