Category Archives: Visual Art

Governor’s Arts Awards presented today

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Arts Community Development recipient Dean Kumpuris

Arts Community Development recipient Dean Kumpuris

The Arkansas Arts Council will present the 2016 Governor’s Arts Awards today at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Sponsored annually by the Arkansas Arts Council, the Governor’s Arts Awards recognize individuals and corporations for outstanding contributions to the arts in Arkansas.

The recipients were nominated by the public and then selected by an independent panel of arts professionals from around the state. Each recipient will be honored at a ceremony in the spring and will receive an original work of art created by Arkansas artist Kelly Edwards.

Lifetime Achievement Award
Suzanne Vining Kunkel, Little Rock

Arts Community Development Award
Dr. Dean Kumpuris, Little Rock

Arts in Education Award
The Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff

Corporate Sponsorship of the Arts Award
Deltic Timber, El Dorado

Folklife Award
Sonny Burgess and The Legendary Pacers, Newport

Individual Artist Award
RB McGrath, Jacksonville

Patron Award
Dr. Thomas A. Bruce, Little Rock

Judges Recognition Award
Theresa Timmons-Shamberger, Maumelle

The selection committee members included Mildred Franco, Arkansas Arts Council board, Pine Bluff; Ed Clifford, The Jones Center, Bentonville; Aj Smith, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Chris James, The Roots Art Connection, North Little Rock; and Cathy Cunningham, Southern Bancorp Community Partners, Helena.

On International Women’s Day, see the Dorthea Lange’s America at the Arkansas Arts Center

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Today is International Women’s Day. The Arkansas Arts Center currently features several exhibitions celebrating women artists.  One of them is Dorthea Lange’s America.  It is on display through May 8.

Dorothea Lange, American (Hoboken, NJ, 1895 – 1965, San Francisco, CA), Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, gelatin silver print, Private Collection, © Dorothea Lange/Oakland Museum of California

Migrant Mother strikes the heart. Dorothea Lange’s iconic image of the Great Depression forces us to confront the humanity and strength of one woman struggling to get her family through the privations they face when there is no money. Dorothea Lange’s America brings together many of the photographer’s images made as she traveled across America during the 1930s documenting the suffering of unemployed or terribly underpaid agricultural workers and their families. Lange took these photographs as part of the photography program connected to the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency formed under the New Deal to assist poor farmers with loans and other programs.

Lange and her fellow FSA photographers recorded the lives of people coping with the dust bowl, bank and business failures, and the loss of their jobs and homes. We see the hopelessness of hungry men in breadlines and the shattered, abandoned cabin of a tenant farmer in the Mississippi Delta. But Americans did not give up. We also see the determination of men doing the grueling work of cutting lettuce for a pittance a day. And there is the radiant smile of an Arkansas mother who went to California to make a new start with her husband and eleven children. Such powerful images helped government agencies and representatives to understand the urgency of helping suffering Americans who had no other place to turn. 80 years later, these black and white documents of American endurance have not lost their impact.

Dorothea Lange’s America includes photographs made by Lange and her FSA colleagues, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. Depression-era photographs from photographers outside the FSA give a wider understand of the time. Here are striking visions by Mike Disfarmer, who worked as a portrait photographer in Heber Springs, Arkansas; and documentary images made from Oklahoma to Alabama by photographic artists including Lewis Hine, Doris Ulmann, and Willard Van Dyke. The exhibition continues with photographs Dorothea Lange made in the same spirit after the FSA was disbanded in 1943.

The Arkansas Arts Council seeking applications for Individual Artist Fellowships

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aaclogo_vertical_colorThe Arkansas Arts Council is accepting applications for its Individual Artist Fellowships. The deadline to apply is April 15, 2016.

The Individual Artist Fellowships annually recognize individual artistic ability and creative excellence to encourage the continuing artistic development of the selected recipients. To be eligible for a fellowship, an artist must be at least 25 years old and must have been an Arkansas resident for at least one year at the time of application.

Individual Artist Fellowships are unconditional, non-matching awards made directly to individual artists. Awarded annually, these fellowships recognize the artistic creative excellence of the recipient’s work and enable the selected artists to devote more time and energy to creating their art and mastering their craft. Funding categories change each year.

Up to nine Individual Artist Fellowships worth $4,000 each will be awarded to artists in the following categories:

  • Literary Arts – Poetry
  • Performing Arts – Music Composition (Folk/Gospel/Jazz/Pop)
  • Visual Arts – Painting (Paintings may include work on canvas, panel, or board, but not on paper.)

Click HERE to download an application, or contact the Arkansas Arts Council at (501) 324-9766. For more information, call Robin McClea at (501) 324-9348 or e-mail robinm@arkansasheritage.org.

The Arkansas Arts Council is an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s ADMIRATION at the Arkansas Arts Center through May 15

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Now through May 15, the Arkansas Arts Center has a special piece of artwork on display!

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Admiration is in the Ted and Virginia Bailey Gallery.

Adoring young women gather around the youthful, winged figure of Cupid, the Roman god of love. The immortal boy playfully points his amorous arrow at a lovely maid who clasps her bosom as if the dart of love has, indeed, struck home. The beautifully crafted painting, its figures rendered with ideal proportions in flawless perspective, was clearly produced by a master. This painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau displays the results as his training in the highest academic manner of the mid-19th century at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and other academies.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, French (La Rochelle, France 1825 – 1905, La Rochelle, France), Admiration, 1897, oil on canvas, 58 x 78 in., Bequest of Mort D. Goldberg to the San Antonio Museum of Art, 59.46.

In 1850, the young artist won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome, the top academic art prize of the day, which enabled him to study classical art in Rome for four years. This began his career as the leading French academic artist of his day; he triumphantly exhibited year after year in the massive annual exhibition known as the Salon. While classical subject matter was supposedly the most proper and edifying material an academic artist of the 19th century could portray, Bouguereau’s success arose at least partially from his ability to infuse a sense of naughty fun into his classical nude figures. That is certainly on display in this delightfully sensual image, which was a success both at the Paris Salon of 1899 and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

This great neoclassical painting comes as a special loan from the San Antonio Museum of Art in exchange for an earlier loan from the Arkansas Arts Center of its 1914 Cubist masterpiece, Dos Mujers, painted by Diego Rivera when the Mexican artist was working in Paris early in his career. Admiration will be accompanied by a related drawing by Bouguereau. The painting and drawing will be complemented by a selection of academic figure drawings from the Arkansas Arts Center’s acclaimed collection of original works on paper. These will allow viewers to see how academic artists drew to study the figure so they could achieve the mastery we see in Bouguereau’s painting.

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 – TESTAMENT sculpture on State Capitol grounds

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Testament 006The 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 1957, nine African-American students enrolled at Little Rock’s Central High School, beginning the process of desegregating Little Rock’s public schools and marking a seminal event in America’s civil rights movement. This sculptural grouping was dedicated in August 2005 to honor the courage of those students, known collectively as the Little Rock Nine. Quotations from each of the Nine are featured around the bronze figures, which are the work of artists John and Cathy Deering.

The site for the statues was selected to face the end of the building which contains the Arkansas Governor’s Office.  It was from those windows that then-Governor Orval Faubus would have looked as he was making decisions to deny the Little Rock Nine entry into Little Rock Central. It is out those windows now that any governor since 2005 looks to see the statues.

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.

Final 2 Days of Coca Cola exhibit at Clinton Center

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Coca-Cola-Bottle-History-v2-hiThe Clinton Presidential Center celebrates the art and history of the Coca-Cola Bottle’s 100-year anniversary during its upcoming temporary exhibit, Coca-Cola: An American Original. The exhibit closes on Monday, February 15.
The exhibit is divided into two sections and occupies both the Garden View room, located on the first floor, and the Temporary Gallery, located on the third floor.
Illustrations of an American Original will be located in the Garden View Room and will have as its focus the now-iconic images and advertising campaigns that have helped define the Coca-Cola brand. Illustrations will include three original paintings by Norman Rockwell, an American artist who created a total of six paintings that were ultimately used in finished Coca-Cola ads. The three others, known as the “Missing Rockwells,” have yet to be located. Additionally, Illustrations feature several images of Santa Claus, including the first Coca-Cola Santa painted by Fred Mizen that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in December of 1930, as well as nine original Haddon Sundblom illustrations.
An American Original at 100 is housed in the Temporary Gallery, bringing together historic bottle “firsts.” It features a 13-bottle chronology, including an original glass bottle produced in 1902, a replica of the prototype contour bottle created by the Root Glass Company in 1915, and a prototype of the aluminum bottle that debuted in 2008.
Also, the exhibit showcases pop art by Andy Warhol—including videos, photographs, prints, and other original works—and folk art by Howard Finster, who incorporated the Coca-Cola bottle into dozens of his pieces over his prolific career. Another portion of this exhibit is dedicated to American presidents and their connection to the global brand. An American Original at 100 was recently on display at the High Museum of Art Atlanta.

 

In addition to Illustrations of an American Original and An American Original at 100, the Center is also displaying a full-size antique Coca-Cola delivery truck produced in 1949 by the White Motor Company and a spectacular hanging installation comprised of more than 750 3D-printed, ribbon-shaped interpretations of the bottle’s classic shape.
Coca-Cola: An American Original is the Center’s 42nd temporary exhibit. It will close on February 15, 2016.  Admission to temporary exhibits is included in the price of Library admission.