"I think you brought the rain with you!" my flying companion, a pink-skinned man with a white crew cut and a navy blazer, says in his Kansas twang.

Our plane has just settled in below the cloud line, and out my window I watch a dull-colored train make its way across this eerily flat landscape.

"Welcome to Wichita," he says as we step out into this Bible Belt Boeing town.

After I get my bags, I ride with my friend Katie Geha, the curator of Wichita State University's Ulrich Museum of Art, into this fifth-tier Midwestern city that has been notably concerned of late with contemporary art.

I'm here for the opening of Poets on Painters, a show I co-curated with Geha that features work by Seattle's Whiting Tennis, and by Seattle poets John Olson, Kary Wayson, and Monica Fambrough, but Wichita isn't concerned with this opening. It's concerned with a giant bronze millipede.

"I don't want you to write that people in Wichita don't care about art," Katie cuts in when I bring up the millipede, "because they do care! I mean, they care as much as anyone anywhere cares."

She's worried because the millipede, a site-specific Tom Otterness sculpture she commissioned, has generated a local controversy not unlike the one that arose around Richard Serra's Tilted Arc years ago in New York City.

The Ulrich plans to install the millipede in a traffic circle on the Wichita State campus, and they had hoped it would be a pleasant companion to Otterness's other sculpture in town, Dreamers Awake, which is a beautiful but creepy take on the capitalist mythos—a bulbous one-armed figure holds up a scythe while a dismembered counterpart lies nearby with little money-bag-hoarding creatures cavorting all around.

But in March the local newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, ran a story about Otterness, a Wichita native, shooting and killing a dog as part of an ill-conceived art project 30 years ago, and since then, the Wichita residents have been heatedly debating the function of public sculpture.

"Sculptor's dog-killing past threatens WSU project" went the headline. The public response on the Eagle's website has been voluminous, ranging from "a big bug isn't even art" to the more active "This piece of art will be destroyed by the students!"

The controversy—which includes a student government candidate running on a platform of cutting student funding for the arts, and many, many letters to the editor—has been profoundly disturbing for Geha, and for Patricia McDonnell, the former Tacoma Art Museum curator who has recently taken over as director of the Ulrich, in no small part because the kerfuffle reinforces what's-the-matter-with-Kansas philistine stereotypes.

It's also disturbing for me, a total Wichita outsider, because Poets on Painters is the Ulrich's first exhibition since the controversy began. I'm not worried the show's opening will be overrun by placard-wielding students—I'm worried about what the controversy might mean for the Ulrich, one of a handful of university-affiliated museums and galleries in the Midwest trying to carve out a niche for themselves in the money-drunk, nepotism-rife, urban world of contemporary art.

The Ulrich and spaces like the Sheldon Memorial Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska; the Price Tower Art Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; and the University Galleries in Normal, Illinois don't have enough money to commission spectacular buildings by Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas for their private collections, but they do have just enough funding to buy contemporary art on the verge of international fame, and they have just enough autonomy to showcase it in adventurous ways—even if it is in their brutal Stalin-esque '70s concrete buildings (although the Price Tower Center inhabits a handsome Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structure). They have the backwater freedom to let their sensibilities play.

The Sheldon, for example, has begun a series of exhibitions that try to place the art of the comic strip within the modernist tradition, a thematic precursor to MoMA's current Comic Abstraction show. The Price Tower Center was the first museum to showcase revolutionary industrial designer Karim Rashid.

These spaces, which aren't tied to powerful donors or overbearing boards of directors like their well-known urban counterparts, remain nimble enough to acquire work by all-star painters like Dana Schutz, Mark Grotjahn, Amy Sillman, and Laura Owens, and then to present the work in an unorthodox way, as Geha and I have tried to do with Poets on Painters, which includes those artists.

Poets on Painters might, finally, have overreached its bounds. When I walk through the gallery on the Wednesday before the opening, I wonder whether anyone will have the patience to tease out the tangential relationships between the rickety collage in Tennis's Bovine painting and the startling adjacency of Brad Flis's typographically experimental poem, or between the supernatural light in Christopher Patch's Reading Room and the reaching for the beyond in John Olson's burlesque prose.

But more importantly I wonder if unusual shows like this, or like the Ulrich's recent showcase of young Slovenian artists, will be discouraged in the wake of the Otterness affair.

As I watch a scruffy undergrad in a "God's Gym" T-shirt peek into the gallery—where Christoph Ruckhäberle's painting of a bare-chested woman with a splayed book between her legs is prominently displayed—I hear a reporter from the Wichita Eagle asking Geha about the show.

His accent isn't the fully pungent Oklahoma or Arkansas variety, nor is it entirely the nasal warble of the Fargo plains. It's just an odd, even-toned honk.

"So tell me what exactly is going on here?"