Thursday, February 9, 2012

Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 16:20:19

A head start on 2nd Friday Art Night

The Cross, at Christ Church
  • "The Cross," at Christ Church

The number of galleries taking part in 2nd Friday Art Night tomorrow night from 5-8 p.m. will blow your mind: Let's count them: The Butler Center Galleries, Historic Arkansas Museum, Old State House Museum, Canvas Community Gallery, StudioMain, Hearne Fine Art, Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, the Courtyard at the Marriott. And those are just the places that are showing art and design; find food at the Green Corner Store, the Copper Grill and Dizzy's Gypsy Bistro. As ever, a rubber-wheeled trolley will shuttle those who don't want to worry with driving all over.

Want to know more? Read my Art Notes column, which leads off with news on the new architecture-design-builder collaborative StudioMain here.

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Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 16:07:47

Emily Wood in Van Buren

PawPaw Low
  • PawPaw Low

Emily Wood, one of the National Museum of Women in the Arts "Women to Watch" nominees who has work on view in the atrium gallery of the Arkansas Studies Institute, opened a show of paintings on wood panels last Sunday at The Center for Art and Education in Van Buren. In an e-mail she writes, "Many of the subjects of my newest works are people that I know from the small Arkansas town where I grew up, which seems appropriate to display in a small old southern church." If you go to the Center's link, you'll see other examples of work in the exhibition, "A Person. A Place.", which will be on display through Feb. 24.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 15:19:18

NY Historical Society paintings at CBMAA

Destruction, from the Course of Empire
  • Destruction, from the Course of Empire

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will show 45 masterworks by Hudson River School artists when "The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision" opens May 5 in the temporary galleries where Wonder World is now.

The New-York Historical Society loan was reported here in January, in an interview with director Don Bacigalupi. There will be a $5 admission fee for persons over 18 to "Nature and the American Vision," though admission to the museum is free.

From the news release:

The New-York Historical Society organized the exhibition with works selected from their rich collections of 19th-century American landscape painting. The exhibition was designed to travel while the society’s galleries were closed during renovations, offering an unprecedented opportunity to share works that have rarely traveled. The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision" includes Thomas Cole’s legendary five-part series The Course of Empire and other masterworks by Cole, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper F. Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and many others. This exhibition at Crystal Bridges will be the last time these works are on display outside of the New-York Historical Society.

The museum will hold special programs on the exhibit with CBMAA curator Kevin Murphy and N.Y. Historical Society

Linda Ferber, New-York Historical Society senior art historian and curator of the exhibition, and Kevin Murphy, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges, will participate in special programs including a private preview and a lecture for Crystal Bridges members.


Wonder World goes down April 2.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 11:32:53

ARTNews on Crystal Bridges

I should have posted this ARTNews article about Crystal Bridges sooner, but better late than never. Author Patricia Failing has done the best job so far, I think, writing about the art in the collection, but then she is a professor of arts history at the University of Washington at Seattle and not a glib reporter who writes from a more limited arts background, like yours truly. Failing has made one teeny error, however — she identified the Arkansas Times as a supporter of the Walton Family. As all Times readers know, that's hardly the case. No matter. I must admit to being thrilled to see something I've written, teeny sentence though it is, quoted in ARTNews!

Failing's views:

Hartley’s 1940 Madawaska—Arcadian Light—Heavy, a portrait of a young boxer with glowing nipples, is especially arresting and well displayed. Crystal Bridges founding curator Chris Crosman’s description of the painting is not coy about its homoerotic allure: the painting, he writes, “reveals Hartley’s full-blown embrace of homosexual desires that up to this point had remained hidden in stylized imagery, encoded in mystical symbols, or subsumed in representations of nature’s heaving rhythms.” ... The early-20th-century room wraps up with a 1936—37 Arshile Gorky still life, which could have been hung in the modern-and-contemporary gallery with an early ho-hum Pollock and a 1946 psuedo-Surrealist painting by David Smith. ... The most ambitious is “Wonder World,” a survey of approaches to “realism” by contemporary artists. Assembled by curatorial director David Houston, formerly chief curator at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the show is both witty and routine—Dan Flavin versus photorealist Richard Estes. This exhibition subverts conventional wisdom about the museum’s collection with several artworks, including a John Baldessari sound sculpture, Nam June Paik’s multimedia portrait of John Cage, an inlaid wood installation by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Roxy Paine’s steel-and-plastic Bad Lawn, Al Souza’s fantastic jigsaw-puzzle collage, and holograms by James Turrell, who was also commissioned to create one of his “skyspaces” for the museum.

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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - 16:23:53

Gaultier in Dallas: Fashion as art

Friends who've just gotten back from seeing "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk" at the Dallas Museum of Art not once but three times suggest that I recommend that you get yourself to Dallas before Feb. 12 to see the show. If you can't get to Dallas, it will show at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco from March 24 to Aug. 19.

Friends say they've never seen crowds like the ones at the Gaultier show. I admit to have a huge weakness for seeing fashion, and since it's unlikely I'll get to Dallas in time, I'll have to content myself with the dresses of Mia Hall now on exhibit in the “UALR Faculty Biennial”:

Mia Hall dresses
  • Mia Hall dresses

The dress in the foreground of the photograph (obviously taken before the show was completely hung) is made entirely of stitched paper towels, and the back of the dress opens to find rubber gloves and cleaning supplies — all those thing every bride needs! — in a built in shelf. In the background is "Did Feminism Kill the "Female Art"?" made of crocheted cotton and resin.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - 15:50:01

Old State House lecture: Laverne Feaster

Feaster
  • Feaster

Laverne Feaster, who worked with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service for 39 years, will talk about her childhood at Big Dixie plantation at noon Wednesday, Feb. 8, at the Old State House Museum, as a part of its Brown Bag Series.

Feaster attended the private Arkadelphia Cotton Plant Presbyterian Academy in Cotton Plant so she could advance beyond the 8th grade, the extent of education in the segregated public school system in which her mother taught. She earned a BS degree from Tennessee State University in Nashville and a MED degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She was also appointed by Governors Clinton and Tucker to the Commission for Arkansas’ Future and the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission.

Admission is free. Participants are encouraged to bring a sack lunch; beverages are provided.

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Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - 15:39:01

Donnangelo at Thea Wednesday

Vase by Janet Donnangelo
  • Vase by Janet Donnangelo

Potter Janet Donnangelo of Russellville is exhibiting her work at the Thea Center starting tomorrow, Feb. 8. The Florida native's work incorporates objects and hews to its source material with earth- and nature-toned glazes. The show will run through March 2.

Donnangelo's work will share the spotlight with the winners of the annual Thea Visual Arts Competition for high school juniors and seniors. Reception is planned for Argenta's Third Friday ArtWalk on Feb. 17.

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Monday, February 6, 2012

Monday, February 6, 2012 - 10:40:54

Scholarship winners at Thea Center

Work by Tulsi Patel, Thea first place winner
  • Work by Tulsi Patel, Thea first place winner

Artwork by winners of the Thea Foundation's 2012 Visual Arts Competition for junior and senior high school students goes on display today at the Thea Center, 401 Main St., NLR.

Ten seniors won college scholarships ranging between $4,000 for first place to $2,000 for 10th. First place winner was Tulsi Patel (Morrilton High), whose work is shown above. Other scholarship winners were Valeria Chavez (El Dorado High), Michaela Osborne (Bentonville High), Derek Schultz (North Little Rock High), Austin Benson (Morrilton High), Katie Connelly (El Dorado High), Cole Harken (Morrilton High), Darren Waddles (Mountain View High), Haley Martin (Lake Hamilton High) and Eun Ha (Little Rock Central High). Three winners from Morrilton — something good happening in that art department there, looks like. There were also seven seniors who won honorable mentions.

First place for juniors, who compete for $100 prizes, went to Emmanuelle Esters of North Little Rock High. Sergio Garcia and Rebecca Richmond, also of NLR High, Jamie Freeman of Cabot, Chris Graham of Benton, Holly Roomsburg of El Dorado, MacKenzie Thompson of Little Rock, Angela Eichhorn of Searcy, and Morgan Thompson and Rebekah Cooley of Paris also won $100. There were five honorable mention winners.

The theme for the work is “Happy Remembrances of the Holiday Season,” taken from the late Thea Kay Leopoulos’ journal entry “Christmas.”

A total of $25,000 in scholarship money was awarded to for seniors and $1,000 in cash prizes to juniors.

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Friday, February 3, 2012

Friday, February 3, 2012 - 15:22:26

Oldenburg at Eleven

Oldenburgs Alphabet/Good Humor
  • Oldenburg's "Alphabet/Good Humor"

It's been pointed out to me that it makes perfect sense that Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has installed Claes Oldenburg's "Alphabet/Good Humor" sculpture of a melting popsicle of letters in its restaurant. Now, you can see the drip off one side.

When it comes to art, A. Walton is something of a Good Humor Woman. She enjoys playful art. Me too, even if the flesh tone/brain form on the Oldenburg makes it hard to love at first.

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Friday, February 3, 2012 - 12:15:30

Laman Library: Women in baseball

Helen Carson
  • Helen Carson

"Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball" opens today at the Laman Library in North Little Rock and All-American Girls Professional League player Dolly Brumfield White will be on hand for the after-hours reception, which begins at 6 p.m. and is open to the public.

"Linedrives and Lipstick" features picture postcards, game programs, photographs, posters and magazine articles from such publications as Colliers, Liberty and the Saturday Evening Post to tell the stories of such players as Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in 1931, and Sophie Kurys of the South Bend Blue Sox, who still holds the record for the most stolen bases in one season in any league (201 steals in 203 attempts in 1946).

White played for the South Bend Blue Sox, Kenosha Comets and Fort Wayne Daisies.

The show comes from the ExhibitsUSA touring program.

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Friday, February 3, 2012 - 11:06:58

Taliaferro: "Women of a New Tribe"

Veronica with Mask
  • Taliaferro image
  • "Veronica with Mask"

Photographer Jerry Taliaferro, who premiered the exhibition "Women of a New Tribe" at the Afro-American Culture Center in his hometown of Charlotte, N.C., has brought the exhibit to Fayetteville, where he took photos of local women to include in the show: A UA student, a doctor, a hair stylist, a minister ... women from all walks of life. The exhibition runs through April in the UA's Mullins Library lobby.

From a press release on the show:

Taliaferro presents his subjects in the dramatic, high-glamour style reminiscent of the photography of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. The photographs explore different themes, such as tribal beauty, portraiture and family relationships. Taliaferro explains that the exhibit’s title was inspired by hearing Toni Morrison refer to African Americans as “New World Africans” in an interview on National Public Radio. This resonated with Taliaferro who believed that “African Americans are a new people born of this new American experience.”
A native of Brownsville, Tenn., Taliaferro joined the Army in 1972 and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1977. His interest in photography began when he was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., for Special Forces training and continued to grow while serving in Germany, where his work was first published in a Munich magazine. After returning to the U.S., Taliaferro left the military for a career in commercial photography. As his interests evolved, he turned to the fine arts. The success of this exhibit inspired the publication of Women of a New Tribe: A Photographic Celebration of the Black Woman in 2007.

Taliaferros Daisy S
  • Taliaferro's "Daisy Spears"

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Friday, February 3, 2012 - 10:54:04

Brick artist Sawaya at Clinton Center

Sawayas Elvis: Remind you of anyone?
  • Sawaya's "Elvis": Remind you of anyone?

Nathan Sawaya, the Lego artist whose work is on display at the Clinton Presidential Center, will be at the library tonight from 6-7 p.m. talking about the exhibit and signing copies of his book, "The Art of the Brick Pictorial" (for sale at the Clinton Museum Store). The exhibit runs through Feb. 12.

Reserve a seat by e-mailing Joy Secuban at jsecuban@clintonfoundation.org or by calling 370-8000.

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