Monthly Archives: February 2016

Art+History Throwback Thursday – Arkansas Arts Center in the 1960s

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On February 9, Little Rock voters will have the chance to say Yes to improving the Arkansas Arts Center, MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, and MacArthur Park.

Leading up to that election is a good time to look back at the development of these entities over the years.  Today, some mid-century images of the Arkansas Arts Center.

AAC 1960sThis includes the cover from the May 1963 dedication week, a jazz album produced by the Arkansas Arts Center, a scene from an early Beaux Arts Ball, and the original Arkansas Arts Center logo (as it appeared on a matchbook).

Early voting now through Feb 8 for Arts+History in Little Rock

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Feb9electionlogoEarly voting started yesterday for the February 9 special election for Arts + History in Little Rock.

By voting FOR on Tuesday, February 9th Little Rock residents can expand and enhance our Arkansas Arts Center, MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, and MacArthur Park. Your vote FOR on February 9th will upgrade facilities and public spaces to ensure the Arkansas Arts Center keeps its accreditation by issuing a bond backed by an existing hotel tax on out of town visitors.

Early voting takes place at the Pulaski County Election Commission headquarters at 501 West Markham (across from City Hall) from 8:00am to 5:00pm through February 8 (no weekend early voting).

On Election Day (February 9), regular polling sites will be open from 7:30am to 7:30pm.

  • Your for vote will keep the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock accredited, with updates to aging facilities over 50 years old, bringing in more world-class exhibitions and educational opportunities.
  • Your for vote will help expand and enhance the Arkansas Arts Center and improve the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History by providing much needed help to aging facilities and addressing landscaping needs in MacArthur Park.
  • Your for vote will spur community involvement by increasing educational opportunities, attracting more world class exhibits, expanding art classes and renovating the Children’s Theatre.
  • Your for vote will establish a public/private partnership between public funding and private donations that ensures our city can expand and enhance the Arkansas Arts Center, MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History and MacArthur Park.

In legalese: An issue of bonds of the City of Little Rock, Arkansas in one or more series in the maximum aggregate principal amount of Thirty-Seven Million, Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($37,500,000.00) for the purpose of financing a portion of the costs of improvements to MacArthur Park, including particularly, without limitation, renovations and additions to, and furnishings and equipment for, the Arkansas Arts Center and renovations and equipment for the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, including any necessary parking, landscaping, signage, drainage, lighting, road and utility improvements in MacArthur Park. The bonds will be payable from and secured by a pledge of the collections of the taxes levied by the City at an aggregate rate of 2% upon the gross receipts or gross proceeds derived and received from the renting, leasing or otherwise furnishing of hotel, motel, bed and breakfast or short-term condominium or apartment rental accommodations for sleeping for profit in the City, pursuant to Ordinance Nos. 21,140 and 21,141 adopted December 1, 2015. The proceeds of the bonds will also be used to provide a debt service reserve and pay costs of issuing the bonds.

 

Black History Month Spotlight – Mosaic Templars Cultural Center

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The new Arkansas Civil Rights History Audio Tour was launched in November 2015. Produced by the City of Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock allows the many places and stories of the City’s Civil Rights history to come to life an interactive tour.  This month, during Black History Month, the Culture Vulture looks at some of the stops on this tour which focus on African American history.

The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center and Museum collects, preserves, interprets and celebrates Arkansas’s unique African American political, economic, and social achievement from 1865 to 1950. The Center resides in the footprint of the original Mosaic Templars of America National Headquarters and Annex Buildings.

The permanent museum exhibits depict historic West Ninth Street as a thriving commercial and social hub, focusing on the black entrepreneurship, Templars organization, and the legacy of black legislators. Between 1868 and 1893, eighty-five African Americans served in the Arkansas General Assembly. The majority served in the House, with nine in the Senate. Election laws passed in 1891, together with a poll tax in 1832, ended the election of African Americans to the legislature. No black person served again until the General Assembly in 1973.

In addition to community educational programs, the Center offers a genealogy research room, an art collection created by local talent, and a well-stocked store. The Center’s third floor features a replica of the original Headquarters Building auditorium and the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame galleries.

The Center is a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage and admission is free.

The app, funded by a generous grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, was a collaboration among UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the City of Little Rock, the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, and KUAR, UALR’s public radio station, with assistance from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Arkansas and the Southern Manifesto explored at Butler Center’s Legacies & Lunch today

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southern_manifestoAt Legacies & Lunch, John Kyle Day, associate professor of history at University of Arkansas at Monticello, will discuss the efforts of the United States Congress to delay desegregation in the 1950s and onward.  The program will take place today (February 3) at 12 noon at the Darragh Center on the CALS campus.

On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the United States Congress promulgated the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. This document formally stated opposition to the landmark United State Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, and the emergent civil rights movement. This allowed the white South to prevent Brown‘s immediate full-scale implementation and, for nearly two decades, set the slothful timetable and glacial pace of public school desegregation. The Southern Manifesto also provided the Southern Congressional Delegation with the means to stymie federal voting rights legislation, so that the dismantling of Jim Crow could be managed largely on white southern terms.

Day’s book, The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation, narrates this single worst episode of racial demagoguery in modern American political history and considers the statement’s impact upon both the struggle for black freedom and the larger racial dynamics of postwar America.

Legacies & Lunch is free, open to the public, and supported in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council. Programs are held from noon-1 p.m. on the first Wednesday of each month. Attendees are invited to bring a sack lunch; drinks and dessert are provided. For more information, contact 918-3033.

Little Rock Look Back: LR Mayor George Wimberly

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https://www.meaningfulfunerals.net/fh_live/10300/10306/images/obituaries/1388392.jpgOn February 3, 1920, future Little Rock Mayor George Wimberly was born in Star City. He served his country first in the Civilian Conservation Corps and later aboard a U.S. Naval Department hospital ship in the Pacific during World War II.

Wimberly was first elected to the Little Rock City Board in November 1968.  He was re-elected in November 1972 and served until December 1976.  In January 1971, he was selected to serve as Little Rock Mayor through December 1972.  In a rare move, he was again selected to serve as Mayor from January 1975 through December 1976.  During the era of the City Board selecting one of their own members to serve as Mayor, George Wimberly was the only one selected to two non-sequential terms.

In 1978, he was elected to the State House of Representatives and served until December 1988.  While in the House he led the effort for smoking to be banned in the House chambers (a move that predated many public smoking bans of the 1990s and onward).

For over fifty years he was an employee and later owner of Buice Drugstore located on Markham in the Stifft Station neighborhood. In 1986 he received the Arkansas Pharmacist of the Year Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

Mayor Wimberly died on February 5, 2012, two days after his 92nd birthday.  He was survived by his wife, two sons, a grandson and several other relatives.

“Disagree to Agree” is topic of February Architecture and Design Network

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According to architect  Neil Denari, it’s not unusual for parties to disagree when it comes to making decisions about  matters architectural. Stands taken in response to deeply seated concerns about money or commitment to “a specific direction and outcome” sometimes lead to stalemates. In his lecture, Denari will talk about ways in which NMDA deploys  “potentially disagreeable ideas into a welcoming context of agreement”. Equal amounts of “logic and enthusiasm” are key to resolving  differences between architect and client.
Tonight (February 2) Denari will discuss this at the Arkansas Arts Center at 6pm as part of the Architecture and Design Network series.  A reception at 5:30 will precede the address.
 
A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Denari, who earned a BArch at the University of Houston and a MArch from Harvard, founded the firm that bears his name in 1988, the same year he began a five year teaching stint at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Currently, he serves as Professor of Architecture and Vice Chair of Architecture and Urban Development (AUD) at UCLA. Living in New York City during the 1980s,  he worked for James Stewart Polshek Partners as a senior designer. Denari has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Arlington. Author, artist and filmmaker as well as architect, Denari has won a number of prestigious awards, including two from the National Academy of Design. 
 
Architecture and Design Network lectures are free and open to the public. Denari’s participation in ADN’s Little Rock lecture series is made possible by the UA Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. For additional information contact ardenetwork@icloud.com.
 
Supporters of Architecture and Design Network include the Arkansas Arts Center, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture, the UA Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and friends in the community. 

Music of Mozart and Mendelssohn tonight at ASO River Rhapsodies concert

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ASO NewStart this February off right by getting your tickets to the third installment of the River Rhapsodies Chamber Series. This concert will include the works of Mozart and Mendelssohn. It starts at 7pm on Tuesday, February 2, in the beautiful Great Hall of the Clinton Presidential Center.

Tickets are $23.

PROGRAM

Dohnányi – Sextet in C Major, Op. 37
Mozart – String Quartet in A Major, K. 169
Mendelssohn – Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66