Whether you have a ticket to CHICAGO tonight or not, drop by Arkansas Repertory Theatre on Friday, March 8, between 5 – 8 p.m. to enjoy REPtrospective, the newest collection of local artwork displayed on our lobby walls.
Each featured artist in this collection has been a part of The Rep’s story and continues to support our future by donating a percentage of all artwork sold back to the theatre.
In conjunction with the 200th anniversary of the creation of the Arkansas Territory, Historic Arkansas Museum is hosting a Bicentennial Bash.
Join them from 5 – 8 pm, for 2nd Friday Art Night, with live music by Two Larks in the Morning and #ArkansasMade beer from 6 Mile Brewing of Ozark
#5WomenArtists
Through their social media campaign #5WomenArtists, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) asks, “Can you name five women artists?” HAM is participating by exhibiting the work of five forward-thinking, female Arkansas artists: Martha Barber, Jenny Delony, Louise Halsey, Elsie Freund, and Natalie Henry.
Through their social media campaign #5WomenArtists, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) asks, “Can you name five women artists?
In response to that, this month five artists with Little Rock connections will be highlighted throughout March. Up first is Elsie Bates Freund.
Born in Missouri in 1912, she was active as an artist in both Eureka Springs and later Little Rock. She died there in 2001.
Freund drew inspiration from her home in the Ozarks and applied it to painting and ceramics. As a painter and ceramicist and she signed all of her jewelry as “Elsa” and her paintings as “Elsie.” Her work can be found at many museums including the Smithsonian, Arkansas Arts Center and Historic Arkansas Museum.
Freund is one of the 5 Women Artists being highlighted by Historic Arkansas Museum this month as part of its #5WomenArtists effort.
South entrance of new AAC
On February 27, 2018, the Arkansas Arts Center unveiled design plans for a renovation that would cost $70 million.
Construction for the museum is scheduled to begin later this year, and the center is expected to open in 2022. The upgrades, led by architecture firm Studio Gang, include new exhibition areas, a children’s theater space, an expanded educational facility, a glass-enclosed walkway, a garden, and the uncovering of the institution’s original facade from 1937. The $24 million budget increase, which does not include additional costs such as architectural or consultants’ fees, will be taken care of by private funds.
Officials originally explained that $50 million in private donations would complement general obligation bonds approved by Little Rock constituents for the expansion of the museum, whose artworks are owned by the nonprofit Arkansas Arts Center Foundation. “It’s a more expensive project than we originally thought it would be,” Studio Gang owner Jeanne Gang said. “You discover things. There’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of, also, ambition for the project to make it visible, to make it really bring the institution up to the next level.”
The building is currently made up of eight different structures that were added over a period of time to the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, built in 1937. Studio Gang’s aim is to offer a more coherent layout, as well as provide additional space for the AAC’s expansive public arts programming of classes, lectures and film showings.
Among the main features of the project is the introduction of a new axis, which will cut through the center of the building. It will lead from the northern entrance facing Crescent Drive to the 36-acre MacArthur Park on the southern side.
Four glazed volumes featuring curved walls and folded roofs will join up to form the axis – a new entrance will be placed at the front with walls angled to open up to the city, while three others will trail towards the park at the rear, ending with a double-height dining room.
Around 127,000 square feet of space will be added or revamped. The enhanced location will feature an edition of British sculptor Henry Moore’s Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1976, which is currently on view in the city’s Union National Plaza.
Polk Stanley Wilcox is the associate architect and SCAPE is the landscape architect. More members of the consulting team were added throughout 2018.
The Clinton Presidential Center’s new temporary exhibit, Cultural Heroes, a collection of seven larger-than-life clay sculptures created by Nashville artist Alan LeQuire, debuts on February 23, 2019, as part of the Clinton Center’s Black History Month celebration.
Each sculpture represents a musician who shaped the soundtrack of the Civil Rights movement: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lead Belly, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Marian Anderson, and Josh White.
The artist’s inspiration for Cultural Heroes is two-fold. One of LeQuire’s favorite museums is the Cluny Museum in Paris. The museum displays the heads of the Kings of France, which were broken off the facade of Notre Dame during the French Revolution and rediscovered during the 1970s. These larger-than-life stone heads made a lasting impact on the artist. Second, he wanted to memorialize to the musicians who put their careers on the line and became the “grandparents of the Civil Rights movement.”
LeQuire is one of the country’s foremost figurative sculptors and is best known for his colossal masterworks, Athena Parthenos, the largest indoor statue in the western hemisphere and Musica, one of the largest bronze figure groups in the world.
The exhibit runs through May 5, 2019.
The Clinton Center’s Black History Month programming is sponsored by First Arkansas Bank & Trust; Mays, Byrd & Associates; and Wilbur Peer, Sr., Farmer and President KKAC Foundation.
George Washington (Lansdowne portrait) by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas, 1796 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
Though Monday the 18th was the Federal George Washington Birthday holiday, today is his actual birthday.
George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland, Virginia. He is one of only two American Presidents to not have any authority over the land now known as Little Rock. Washington never ventured west of the Mississippi River, so never visited Arkansas.
As the first President and Father of his Country, he has many things named after him. In Little Rock, Washington Street is named in his honor.
The Washington Inaugural Bible
In 2013, two Little Rock museums highlighted George Washington artifacts. Historic Arkansas Museum displayed the Washington family Bible for several months. At the start of that time, they also showcased the Bible on which Washington swore his first oath as President (the inaugural inaugural?).
A few months later, the Clinton Presidential Center featured Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 “Acts Passed at a Congress of the United States of America.” This artifact had been purchased by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 2012.
In 2004, the Arkansas Arts Center exhibited the 1796 Gilbert Stuart Landsdowne Portrait of Washington. This was on display a few months before the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center. In 1976, they had an exhibit dedicated to 18th and 19th century portraits of the Washington, Custis and Lee families. Five years earlier, the museum had displayed prints of Washington in April 1971.
Join the Clinton Center on Thursday, February 21 at 6 p.m., for a discussion with three nationally-acclaimed, Arkansas-based artists for Contemporary Craft: A Conversation, moderated by Brian Lang. The panel will discuss contemporary craft art in Arkansas, the evolution of their work, how craft art is different than traditional fine art, and the role they think craft art plays in reflecting culture.
Brian J. Lang (moderator)
Brian Lang is the chief curator and Windgate Foundation curator of contemporary craft at the Arkansas Arts Center.
Linda Nguyen Lopez (Panelist)
Linda Nguyen Lopez is first-generation American ceramic artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us. She is currently an Instructor and Interim Head of Ceramics at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
James Matthews (Panelist)
James Matthews is a documentary artist with a bias toward the human-made landscape, manual processes, and the physical object. His Eviction Quilts series features works made from clothes and bedding left curbside after an eviction. Matthews lives in Little Rock.
Leon Niehues (Panelist)
From Huntsville, Leon Niehues has been making baskets, sculptural baskets, and bentwood sculpture for 36 years. While using traditional materials and techniques, he adds innovative ideas, methods of construction, and new and unique materials to his pieces. Niehues, and his wife Sharon, were included in The White House Collection of American Crafts.
This program is FREE and open to the public, but reservations are required.
This program is held in conjunction with the Clinton Center’s current temporary exhibition, The White House Collection of American Crafts: 25th Anniversary Exhibit. The collection was originally assembled in 1993, at the request of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The White House Collection of American Crafts was created to coincide with the year designated “The Year of American Craft: A Celebration of the Creative Works of the Hand” by a Joint Resolution of Congress and a Presidential Proclamation by President George H. W. Bush. The collection includes 73 works created by 78 of America’s foremost craft artisans.
Little Rock Culture Vulture 