Monthly Archives: February 2016

Tonight at Mosaic Templars – Spoken Word with Foreign Tongues

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mtcc ftFan favorite, Foreign Tongues Poetry Troupe will be performing at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center tonight (2/27) at 6pm.

Foreign Tongues is an artistic organization that travels, conducts workshops, and performs poetry in Arkansas and throughout the United States. The group is composed of authors, educators, entertainers, actors, visual artist, playwrights, award-winning slam poets, hip-hop artist, and entrepreneurs. The group is a diverse collective linked by a common thread, which is their love of poetry.

Admission is free, but seating is limited.

For more information, contact Tameka Lee at 501.683.3620 or tameka@arkansasheritage.org

Clinton School Team Continues Work on the Delta Visual Arts Show

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Clinton-School-of-Public-Service-LogoA University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service student team-based project is continuing work on the Delta Visual Arts Show this weekend.

Started eight years ago by Clinton School students, the Newport Downtown Revitalization and Improvement Volunteer Effort (D.R.I.V.E.) and the Newport Economic Development Commission (NEDC), the Delta Visual Arts Show featured 13 local artists in its first year.

Now in its eighth year, The Delta Visual Arts Show will take place this Saturday, February 27th, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. in downtown Newport, Ark., and will feature more than 180 artists from around the Delta.

Over the past eight years, multiple teams and projects have continued and expanded work in Newport and the surrounding area, including the creation of an alumni database, the study of Newport’s Blue Bridge, and the coordination of the first Delta Visual Arts Show.

This year, a Clinton School team will be helping with logistics during the Delta Visual Arts Show and will develop a fundraising plan to create a visual arts center in downtown Newport, continuing the collaboration started by the first team in 2008.

Students participating this year are Stacy Cox (Little Rock, Ark.), Zachary Glembin (Milwaukee, Wis.), Beau Papan (Little Rock, Ark.), and Keith Preciados (Miami, Fla.).

For more information on the show, visit www.newportaredc.org or call (870) 523-1009.

Black History Month Spotlight – Freedom Riders and Sit-In Demonstrators

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UALR Trail Sit inThe 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 Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail was launched in 2011 by the UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity.  Each year, a theme is chosen to honor a particular group of people who were active in Arkansas’s civil rights movement.  Year by year, the trail grows.  The plan is that over time the trail will stretch from the current starting point at the Old State House, down West Markham Street and President Clinton Avenue to the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, and then back up the other side of the street to opposite the Old State House.

Freedom Riders and Sit-In Demonstrators

In 1961, the Freedom Rides spread across the South to place pressure on local communities and the federal government to implement court-ordered desegregation of bus terminal facilities.  Little Rock’s first Freedom Riders, a contingent of five members of the St. Louis branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, arrived on the evening of July 10 at the Mid-West Trailways bus station at Markham and Louisiana.  A plaque there marks the site and tells the story of the Little Rock Freedom Rides.  The pressure exerted by the Freedom Rides, together with an Interstate Commerce Commission order to desegregate, led to the integration of all Little Rock’s bus terminals on November 1, 1961.  Five markers also commemorate Philander Smith College students involved in sit-in demonstrations between 1960 and 1962, as well as members of the Arkansas Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.  SNCC was active in Arkansas from 1962 to 1967.

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.

Tonight at 7, Arkansas Sounds salutes composers Florence Price and William Grant Still at Ron Robinson Theater

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AR Sounds price_stillTwo of the leading American classical music composers in the first half of the 20th Century were from Arkansas and were African American.  Tonight (February 26) Arkansas Sounds pays tribute to Florence B. Price and William Grant Still in a program at 7pm at the Ron Robinson Theater.

Arkansas Sounds pays tribute to two of Arkansas’s most highly acclaimed African American classical composers with a screening of The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price followed by performances of Price’s and Still’s compositions by members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and the ASO Youth Orchestra. The film’s length is approximately 1 hour.

Little Rock native Florence Price (1887-1953) was the first African American female classical composer to have her composition played by a major American symphony orchestra. The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price traces Price’s life, detailing her cultured childhood in an extraordinarily gifted family, her struggles and eventual departure from the South due to racial tension, and her great artistic impact and success. Her compositions were favored by famed soprano Marian Anderson, and in 1933, her “Symphony in E Minor” was performed at the Chicago World’s Fair by the Chicago Symphony.

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, and raised in Little Rock, William Grant Still (1895-1978) achieved national and international acclaim as a composer of symphonic and popular music and, as an African American, was hailed for breaking race barriers of his time. His Afro-American Symphony was the first symphony composed by an African American to be played by a major symphony orchestra and is still performed today. Still was a prolific composer whose work includes symphonies, ballets, operas, chamber music, and works for solo instruments, totaling nearly 200. He also received numerous honors and achievements such as the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934, 1935, and 1938. He also received eight honorary degrees from institutions such as Oberlin College, the University of Arkansas, Pepperdine University, and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (ASO) comprises the state’s most sought-after professional musicians and is celebrating its 50th season. The ASO Youth Orchestra comprises over 200 student musicians, ages 9-18, who travel from over thirty-seven communities throughout Arkansas.

Tonight at 9pm at South on Main After Hours – Siamese, Jacob Metcalf & Young Speilberg

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som jacobmetcalf.jpg.190x140_q60_cropSouth on Main After Hours welcomes Siamese, Jacob Metcalf & Young Speilberg to the stage, tonight.

Admission is $10. You may purchase a wristband beginning at 4:00 pm. The show begins at 9:00 pm. Call South on Main at 501-244-9660 to make a reservation.

ABOUT JACOB METCALF
North Texas musician Jacob Metcalf will be releasing his first full-length solo effort, Fjord, later this winter. And while fans of his two longtime groups, Fox and the Bird and Dallas Family Band, might expect a similar rootsy update on rural American music, the sparsely orchestrated cinematic folk that sweeps through these 11 tracks are sure to cover the listener in permafrost and thaw them back out again.

The material for the record was written over the last decade on five continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America). It was during the last few years that Metcalf lived out of his car and inside a four foot crawl space between a vintage store and loft apartments in order to save enough from his bakery and music teaching jobs to make this album. Recorded in Austin, Ft. Worth and Dallas over the last two years with more than 20 talented musician friends, the singer-songwriter and band members would often use the streets to hone these songs before dressing up the arrangements in the studio.

The result is an often-breathtaking collection of indie-folk compositions that range from wistful, unhurried ballads to swirling, majestic orchestrations, sometimes within the same song, and all set to Metcalf’s warm, inviting vocals and non-linear story-telling.

ABOUT SIAMESE
Siamese is an avant glam art pop band from Dallas, TX, who utilize sets, costuming and lighting to create a sometimes ominous, always opulent live show. It is comprised of members Paul Alonzo (bass), Paul Grass (drums), Nicole Marxen-Myers (vocals, synth, guitar), and Teddy Georgia Waggy (vocals, guitar), each of whom brings skills in carpentry, sewing, painting and film production, respectively, to create their sets and costumes.

This winter Siamese premiered its second recording, Neon Lights, as well as its second set design, a futuristic visual brew inspired by ectoplasm-shilling charlatans and 2001: A Space Odyssey. For their previous set, a floral arrangement nightmare, the members made over 2,000 paper flowers by hand, which drove them crazy and ended up being good inspiration for their psychotic funeral director alter egos. The band is set to record their inaugural EP in February, to be released in spring 2016.

Marxen-Myers and Waggy started the project as a way to explore malleable identity, to blend music and visual art, and to face the vulnerability of live performance. In late 2014, they asked Alonzo and Grass to join them, two old friends of theirs with a like-minded love of creating other worlds. The band began writing its music together, with Nicole and Teddy adding lyrics that deal with their own modern apathy and colonial guilt; with the surreal fragility of our fleshy human bodies commingling with the cold clean space age; and sometimes, with the inner workings of their favorite sociopathic film characters.

In less than ten shows, they’ve already shared bills with the likes of Pinkish Black and Tele Novella, played the historic Texas Theater, received press coverage from Central Track, ANON Magazine and We Denton Do It, and their two releases are in regular rotation on The Local Ticket and Dallas’ NPR music station, KXT

Science After Dark: Wine & Chocolate – tonight at the Museum of Discovery

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How does the Museum of Discovery’s monthly Science After Dark top itself?  What do people love more than STAR WARS? The answer is, of course, Wine and Chocolate!

Tonight from 6pm until 9pm, Science After Dark focuses on Wine and Chocolate.

Explore fermentation, the science of making chocolate and discover the process of pairing the two!
You must be at least 21 years of age to attend.
Admission is $5
Bring cash for beer from Stone’s Throw Brewing and beer, cocktails and pizza from Damgoode Pies River Market.

Black History Month Spotlight – Pike-Fletcher-Terry Mansion

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IMG_5151The 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.

In 1958, in this stately antebellum home, seventy-six-year-old Adolphine Fletcher Terry helped to organize the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). Always involved in civic activities, she was dismayed that the four high schools in Little Rock remained closed rather than become integrated. Mrs. Terry told Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore that “It’s clear to me that the men are not going to take the lead in turning this thing around and so the women are going to have to.” She organized the Women’s Emergency Committee (WEC).

When segregationist school board members tried to fire forty-four teachers and administrators who supported integration in the public schools, the WEC worked with a group of businessmen who had organized a Stop This Outrageous Purge (STOP) campaign to elect new school board members who favored integration. High schools were reopened with token integration in August 1959. The WEC operated in secret because of concerns about harassment or worse. In 1998, on the fortieth anniversary of its founding, the names of WEC members were released for the first time. Those names are now etched in the window panes of the house.

Originally built in approximately 1840 by Albert Pike, it was purchased by Lou Krause from the Pike family in 1886. In 1889, she sold it to her brother-in-law, former Little Rock Mayor John Gould Fletcher. He was the father of Adolphine Fletcher Terry, who grew up in the house.  Since the 1970s, it has been property of the City of Little Rock for use by the Arkansas Arts Center.  This was stipulated in the wills of Mrs. Terry and her sister Mary Fletcher Drennan.

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.