Quiet Currents and City Lights
Emily Million
Artist Statement
This two-sided design reflects the dual spirit of Springfield, Missouri—where natural beauty and urban vitality exist in constant conversation.
Quiet Currents honors the lakes, rivers, and wooded landscapes that shape life in the Ozarks. The image of paddlers moving gently across the water speaks to reflection, connection, and the steady rhythms of nature. Beneath the surface of movement lies stillness—an invitation to pause, to listen, and to experience Springfield not just as a destination, but as a place of immersion. The water becomes a metaphor for time itself: flowing forward, yet always carrying memory.
In contrast, City Lights celebrates the energy and gathering places of downtown Springfield, particularly Park Central East. The illuminated fountain and surrounding architecture represent civic pride, shared history, and the vibrancy of a community that continues to evolve. Here, light symbolizes creativity, progress, and the warmth of human connection. Where the natural landscape offers quiet reflection, the city offers shared experience.
Together, these scenes express the fullness of Springfield as the Birthplace of Route 66. The Mother Road may symbolize movement and travel, but this piece reminds us that meaningful journeys include both solitude and community—moments of quiet current and moments under city lights.
Springfield is not only a point of origin. It is a place to arrive, to gather, and to return to—again and again.
Thank you to our Sculpture Sponsor
Emily Million
Emily Million’s story begins before she was even born. While her mother—pregnant with Emily—was finishing her degrees in Fine Art and Early Childhood Education at Missouri State University, her water broke during a sculpture class taught by Dwaine Crigger. Emily often jokes that she was literally born to make art.
The daughter of an artist, she grew up immersed in a creative, art-filled environment. That early foundation led her to earn a full-ride scholarship to pursue her BFA in Painting at Missouri State University. After graduating, Emily began exhibiting her work in galleries and, at just 23 years old, became one of the youngest recipients of the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation art grant.
Shortly thereafter, she spent nearly a decade traveling across the United States and Canada painting large-scale landscape and wildlife murals for Bass Pro Shops. Along with Bass Pro, her work is featured in the Wonders of Wildlife National Museum & Aquarium (Springfield, Missouri), the Ducks Unlimited Museum (Memphis, Tennessee), private estates of the Anheuser-Busch family and the Taylor family (Enterprise Rent-A-Car), as well as educational institutions, wellness businesses, and residential and commercial spaces throughout North America.
Several years ago, Emily experienced a pivotal moment that shifted the direction of her work. Following a vivid dream that called her to move away from her Bass Pro projects, she felt guided to use her artistic gifts within the medical cannabis space to help change the stigma surrounding plant medicine. Trusting this spiritual directive, she began exploring cannabis visually through her paintings and eventually found the courage to share this deeply personal body of work.
Since then, Emily has created art for cannabis patients and companies across Missouri and has been widely recognized as the “Cannabis Artist of Missouri.” Her work has been published in multiple editions of Missouri’s statewide monthly cannabis magazine, The Evolution, for which she has also created numerous cover artworks.
Emily’s practice has continued to evolve, expanding into a broader exploration of the natural world and its many forms of medicine. Her newest body of work investigates themes of sacred geometry, Divine Order, and the healing intelligence embedded within nature. She is currently developing a series of Bird Medicine paintings—meditative, healing works intended to function as yantras and visual transmissions. Drawing on her background in museum-quality realism, Emily combines detailed depictions of the natural world with visual representations of sound vibrations and sacred geometric forms, inviting viewers into deeper truths of reality and the Divine Order present throughout all of Creation.