Category Archives: History

Marching to 2nd Friday Art Night

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2FAN logo Font sm2March’s 2nd Friday Art Night features host of outstanding art exhibits and music performances throughout Downtown Little Rock tonight from 5pm to 8pm.

Among the highlights this month are:

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies

  • No I’m Not, He Is: A Flying Snake and Oyyo Comic Retrospective – Created by artist and musician Michael Jukes, the popular Flying Snake and Oyyo cartoon strip was featured in Little Rock’s alternative newspapers during the eighties. This exhibition gathers the cream of the corniest Flying Snake cartoons and other artworks for your viewing pleasure. Through May 25.
    • From the Vault: Works from the CALS Permanent Collection – Managed by CALS’s Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the library’s art program also collects and supports artists working and living in Arkansas. This exhibition features historical and contemporary artwork that shows the breadth and quality of art being created in Arkansas. On display in the exhibition will be historical paintings by Donald Draper, small works on paper by Little Rock’s own visionary artist Arthur Grain, a spectacular sculpture by Mary Cockrill, and much more. Through April 27
    • Clinton for Arkansas – Selected materials from the Bill Clinton State Government Project depict Clinton’s political career in Arkansas and its impact on the state. Items representing both politics and policy are featured, including materials from his run for Congress in 1974 and his term as attorney general, as well as from his twelve years as governor. In addition, the exhibition highlights campaign memorabilia from 1974 through his second presidential bid in 1996. Through April 27.

 

Old State House Museum

  • Fourte in Concert – Fourte, the Youth String Quartet of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, will perform in the 1885 House of Representatives Chamber.
  • Things You Need to Hear: Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas – Just how different was life in Arkansas 50 or 100 years ago?  This exhibit explores the histories of regular folk from 1890 to 1980.  The exhibit is developed from years of oral histories compiled by special guest curator Margaret Jones Bolsterli.

 

Historic Arkansas Museum

  • Hidden Arkansas is an assortment of visual impressions by a group of creative art photographers from the Blue-Eyed Knocker Photo Club, begun in 2008. The assignment challenged the artists to capture in print form what each feels is “hidden” in Arkansas. Some found memories in the closets of an older building, hidden completely until hit just right by sunlight. Artists exhibiting are: Cindy Adams, Darrell Adams, Gail Arnold, James Allen, Ann Ballard Bryan, Mary Chamberlain, Ray Chanslor, Susan Crisp, Susan Ebel, Rachel Green and Rachel Louisa Worthen.
  • Opening reception with live music by Peg Roach Loyd on May 8, 5 – 8 pm, in conjunction with downtown Little Rock’s 2nd Friday Art Night

Legacies & Lunch today: Women During the Civil War

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howardArkansas women faced monumental challenges during the Civil War. To commemorate Women’s History Month, Rebecca Howard will speak about women during the Civil War era for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies’ Legacies and Lunch program on Wednesday, March 6, at noon in the Main Library’s Darragh Center, 100 Rock Street.

Howard’s presentation will focus on the stories of northwest Arkansas women who faced hardships including starvation, displacement, and harassment. She uses diaries, newspaper articles, government claims, and service and pension records to illustrate the experience of a variety of northwest Arkansas women, from the perspectives of Union and Confederate, rich and poor, black and white.

Howard is currently a PhD candidate in History at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She completed her undergraduate work at Texas A&M. A northwest Arkansas native, Howard is focusing her dissertation work on that region during and after the Civil War.

The Butler Center’s Legacies & Lunch program is free and open to the public and supported in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council. Attendees are invited to bring a sack lunch; drinks and dessert will be provided.

The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies is a department of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS). It was founded in 1997 to promote the study and appreciation of Arkansas history and culture. The Butler Center’s research collections, art galleries, and offices are located in the Arkansas Studies Institute building at 401 President Clinton Ave. on the campus of the CALS Main Library. For more information, call 918-3086.

NATURAL STATE NOTABLES book launched on Monday

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natural_state_notablesSchool-aged children can learn about famous Arkansans in Natural State Notables: 21 Famous People from Arkansas by Steven Teske, a new book from Butler Center Books. Teske will read from the book and sign books, which will be available for purchase, on Monday, March 4, at 4:00 p.m. in the Central Arkansas Library System’s (CALS) Children’s Library and Learning Center at 4800 W. 10th Street.

Biographies on Arkansans including Maya Angelou, Johnny Cash, Bill Clinton, John Grisham, Scottie Pippen, Winthrop Rockefeller, Mary Steenburgen, and Sam Walton highlight the accomplishments and backgrounds of some of Arkansas’s most celebrated sons and daughters. The book features pictures, timelines, and information on each Arkansan.

Natural State Notables author Steven Teske works as an archival assistant for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. He has also written Unvarnished Arkansas about famous people in Arkansas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he co-wrote Homefront Arkansas about life in Arkansas during wartime from the war with Mexico in 1848 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first century. He has worked for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, the Butler Center’s online resource about the state of Arkansas, and he teaches college classes in history and comparative religions for the Arkansas State University-Beebe’s campus on the Little Rock Air Force Base.

Butler Center Books is a project of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System. This publishing program was made possible by a gift from John G. and Dora “DeDe” Ragsdale. Butler Center Books publishes volumes that increase knowledge about and appreciation of the history and culture of Arkansas. The University of Arkansas Press in Fayetteville is the distribution agent for Butler Center Books.

The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies was founded in 1997 to promote the study and appreciation of Arkansas history and culture. The Butler Center’s research collections, art galleries, and offices are located in the Arkansas Studies Institute building at 401 President Clinton Ave. on the campus of the CALS Main Library.

The event, which will include a reception and a preview tour of the new facility, is free and open to the public. RSVP to marey@cals.org or 918-3033. The Children’s Library will open on Saturday, March 16.

Sandwiching in History at St. John’s Seminary today

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Today the Sandwiching in History program visits the St. John’s Seminary, located at 2500 N. Tyler Street.  Sandwiching in History is sponsored by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.

StJohn3This campus was built in 1916 to house Little Rock College for Boys until it closed in 1929. From 1930 until it closed in 1967 St. John Home Mission Seminary was located at this site.

In 1968, the campus was renamed St. John Catholic Center when it became the home of the Diocese of Little Rock offices. Today it also serves as a retreat center and residence for retired diocesan priests.

The “Sandwiching In History“ program is a series of tours that seeks to familiarize people who live and work in central Arkansas with the historic structures and sites around us. The tours take place on Fridays at noon, last less than an hour, and participants are encouraged to bring their lunches so that they can eat while listening to a brief lecture about the property and its history before proceeding on a short tour.

The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program is an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage.

Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass continues at Arkansas Arts Center

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Contraband Bayou, Louisiana - 1941

Contraband Bayou, Louisiana – 1941

As America awaited the declaration of war in the spring of 1941, photographer Edward Weston set out on a cross-country photographic expedition.  Now through April 21, the Arkansas Arts Center is playing host to an exhibit of his photos from that expedition.  Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Weston, one of America’s leading modernist photographers, was making photographs for a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The Limited Editions Club of New York commissioned these images to bring together the great nineteenth-century poet’s verbal celebration of America with the great twentieth-century photographer’s visual odyssey.

In accepting the assignment, Weston declined to literally illustrate Whitman’s words, yet the two portraits of America echo one another. Where Whitman’s nineteenth-century verse was shaped by the Civil War, Weston’s images anticipated World War II.

Weston’s trip lasted almost ten months, covering 24 states and nearly 25,000 miles. Weston and his wife, Charis Wilson, drove their trusty Ford, “Walt,” throughout the South, the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and back home to California after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought about America’s entry into the war. Weston’s photographs include studies of decaying southern mansions, the Boulder Dam, a homely display of old bottles, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans cemeteries, and haunting portraits of people the photographer met along the way.

Weston’s images form no detached national survey; rather they embody an idiosyncratic personal meditation on selected American places, objects, and people. Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass includes 53 photographs chosen from the approximately 700 negatives Weston developed from the trip.

Little Rock Look Back: Mayor Byron R. Morse

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20130222-185157.jpgOn February 23, 1917, future Little Rock Mayor Byron R. Morse was born. A founder of the real estate firm of Rector-Phillips- Morse, he was long active in civic affairs of Little Rock.

Mayor Morse was first elected to the City Board of Directors in November 1960. In 1963, he was chosen as Little Rock Mayor. After serving two years as Mayor, he chose to not seek re-election to the City Board. In 1980, he was appointed to the City Board to fill out an unexpired term. He was later asked to fill another unexpired term but declined.

In 1983, he was elected national president of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors. Mayor Morse also served as president of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, the Little Rock United Way, the Little Rock Red Cross, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Little Rock Boy’s Club. He was a member of the Fifty for the Future. On July 25, 2001, Mayor Morse died.

Arkansas Arts Center features Wendy Maruyama’s Executive Order 9066

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Watchtower

Wendy Maruyama
Watchtower, 2008

Exhibits look at Japanese-American internment camps during WWII

This exhibition combines two projects of Wendy Maruyama, a studio furniture maker and head of the studio furniture program at San Diego State University. These projects, the Tag Project and Executive Order 9066, together tell the story of the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

In the Tag Project, Maruyama replicated 120,000 individual identification tags worn by the internees in the ten relocation camps, including two in Arkansas. Maruyama assembled the re-created paper tags in ten groups, each group representing all the internees at a specific camp. Each of these groupings hangs from the gallery ceiling and is about 11 feet tall. Maruyama has folded the Tag Project into a parallel project of hers titled Executive Order 9066 to show them together in this exhibition.

Executive Order 9066 was the directive signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordering the incarceration of all people of Japanese ancestry then resident in the United States. For the parallel project, Maruyama created work that explores ethnicity and identity through suitcases, footlockers and steamer trunks, artifacts from their owners’ forced relocation journey in 1942.

The exhibits were organized by The Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston.

The Arts Center has collaborated with the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the Arkansas Center for History and Culture to organize Relics of Rohwer: Gaman and the Art of Perseverance, a related exhibition documenting the experiences and artwork of Japanese Americans at Rohwer, one of two internment camps located in Arkansas.The artwork is on loan from the Mabel Rose Jamison Vogel/Rosalie Santine Gould Collection, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System.