This month’s musical guest for 2nd Friday Art Night at the Old State House Museum will be Runaway Planet, the 2019 Bluegrass Artist of the Year winner at the Arkansas Country Music Awards!
You’ll love the sound of the band’s unique “mix of hard-driving bluegrass, three-part harmonies, complex arrangements and original songs.”
Free Admission!
Join Christ Church on 2nd Friday Art Night as they open their newest exhibit for the Arts at Christ Church, featuring Jane F. Hankins’s collection “Our Better Angels,” together with works by clients of Jericho Way, a homeless day center in Little Rock.
Hankins’ art will showcase her whimsical creativity. The work by Jericho Way clients ranges in a variety of styles. These exhibits will be on display and available for purchase through the end of December 2019.
The opening reception will be from 5:00pm to 7;30pm.
Join Historic Arkansas Museum for a preview of “Sleepy Hollow” presented by Ballet Arkansas.
The multimedia ballet, designed in collaboration with the creative team at Cranford Co., features projected video and photo backdrops filmed at HAM. This unique take on Washington Irving’s classic tale combines the beauty of visual art with breathtaking original choreography by Executive and Artistic Director, Michael Fothergill, and local scenery. Come experience a first look of the first production of Ballet Arkansas’ 41st season, and enjoy a Q/A with the choreographer after the preview.
In addition to the ballet performance…
🍂 Autumn activities on the Historic Grounds
🎶 Live music by The Marchese Hendricks Project
🧼 Sawmill Gap Mercantile in the Museum Store highlighting a selection of their products
The reception is sponsored by the Historic Arkansas Museum Foundation, with special thanks to 107 Liquor. Beverages and appetizers will be served in the Stella Boyle Smith Atrium including beer from Stone’s Throw Brewing. The exhibits and reception are free and open to the public.
The Little Rock Winds and conductor Israel Getzov open their 2019-20 Season on Thursday, October 10th at 7:30 p.m. with “Melody and Passion”, a program of gorgeous melodies that exude passion and fire!
And, for the first time, the LR Winds’ will feature a string player as the guest soloist. Stephen Feldman, cello, will perform Tramonto: Romanza for Cello and Winds, a reflective piece by Luis Serrano Alarcón that artfully employs full wind symphony accompaniment to the romantic cello solo. Other lush melodies include songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby. Chance’s Incantation and Dance and the finale from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 present passion and fire so hot, the band may need fire-proof tuxes.
7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 10, 2019
Second Presbyterian Church, 600 Pleasant Valley Drive, Little Rock.
Tickets are available online at lrwinds.org and are $15 for adults, $12 for adults 65 and over, and free for students.
Program
Davide Delle Cese L’Inglesina
John Barnes Chance Incantation and Dance
Eric Whitacre The Seal Lullaby
George Gershwin Porgy & Bess
Luis Serrano Alarcón Tramonto: Romanza for Cello and Winds
Stephen Feldman, cello
Dimitri Shostakovich Symphony #5: Finale
Leonard Bernstein Slava!
A gifted and enthusiastic communicator in recitals, chamber music, and solo performances, Stephen Feldman’s cello playing has taken him from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Sacramento, California. Formerly a member of the Fetter and Rivanna String Quartets, he also performed in the Quapaw and Sturgis String Quartets during his six years with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
A graduate of Swarthmore College, the Eastman School of Music, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Feldman’s mentors include cellists Steven Doane and Timothy Eddy. He considers chamber music coach Julius Levine and Baroque specialists Arthur Haas and Paul O’dette also to be significant musical influences.
Israel Getzov has been the Music Director and Conductor of the Little Rock Wind Symphony since 2015. He also serves as Music Director of the Conway Symphony Orchestra, and previously held the position of Associate Conductor of the Arkansas Symphony and Principal Conductor of the Tianjin Philharmonic, the resident orchestra of the Tianjin Grand Theater. Mr. Getzov has conducted orchestras throughout the United States and abroad including Abilene Philharmonic, Asheville, Symphony, Cleveland Pops, Monroe Symphony, Skokie Valley Symphony, Shanghai Philharmonic, Symphony of the Mountains, Tianjin Symphony, Zhejiang Symphony Orchestra, Bolivia Classica, University of Taipei Symphony, and the Encuentro Jovenes Musicos Festival in La Paz, Bolivia.
Mr. Getzov started the violin at age 3, and later studied viola, piano and percussion. An in-demand educator of ensemble techniques, Mr. Getzov holds a tenured professorship at the University of Central Arkansas and has given clinics at many schools in the U.S. and internationally. A
Little Rock Winds was founded in 1993 to recognize the diverse heritage of the wind band tradition in Arkansas. It is dedicated to providing Arkansas communities live wind band music, including a variety of compositions and transcriptions that inspire audiences, challenge the players, and preserve the wind band tradition. LR Winds is an important outlet for the wind and percussion musicians in the central Arkansas area. The approximately 48 professional and semi-professional musicians are selected by audition and participate for personal development and enjoyment and as a service to the community. Six concerts are performed annually in Little Rock, and the band has performed statewide, from Texarkana to Cherokee Village, Harrison to McGehee.
Little Rock’s cultural organizations THRIVE on community outreach programs. Below are just a few examples of organizations going out into the community or bringing community members to them. So many more photos could have been shown.
Ballet Arkansas performing at a school as a preview for an upcoming performance.
Students participating in the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s Petting Zoo giving them a chance to play musical instruments. This event took place in conjunction with the Museum of Discovery.
Mentors and participants in the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmmaking Lab for Teen Girls. Two films written, directed, designed, edited, and scored by these teenage female filmmakers were shown at ACS’s 2019 Filmland.
The Arkansas Repertory Theatre has student matinees for most of its productions. Here are just a few of the students who have attended in 2019. For many of them, a trip to the Rep is the first live theatre they have seen.
In a triple partnership, ACANSA Arts Festival of the South, Little Rock’s Arts+Culture Commission and the Central Arkansas Library System sponsored a free opening night art exhibit in September which drew hundreds of people of all ages.
The Arkansas Arts Center’s Super Sunday Family Free Fun Day is a monthly program offering free arts activities for children. While the MacArthur Park location is closed, it will be at the CALS Hillary Clinton Children’s Library. Next one is October 13.
Walter E. Hussman Jr., is the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a third-generation newspaperman whose family acquired a chain of newspapers stretching from Tennessee to Missouri.
As publisher of the Arkansas Democrat, in 1991, Hussman purchased the assets of the Gazette and began publishing the Democrat-Gazette. Hussman will speak about the newspaper industry, including the recent decision to transition the Democrat-Gazette to a digital-only format Monday-Saturday.
He is speaking tonight (October 10) at the CALS Ron Robinson Theater. Admission is free, please reserve tickets at http://www.cals.org.
Mr. Hussman’s appearance is the 2019 J.N. Heiskell Program, an annual event held in honor of John Netherland (J. N.) Heiskell who served as editor of the Arkansas Gazette for more than seventy years. Mr. Heiskell was also a trustee of the Little Rock Public Library (forerunner of CALS) from 1910 until his death in 1972 at the age of 100.
Mr. Hussman is not the first person to own the assets of both the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat. The first to have that designation was J. N. Heiskell who owned the Democrat for a couple of years in the late 1900’s/early 1910s.
Today, October 10, 2019, Jane DeDecker’s Every Word We Utter sculpture and the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Plaza will be dedicated in the Vogel Schwartz Sculpture Garden in Riverfront Park.
The ceremony will take place at 11:00am. Among the speakers will be Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Mayor Frank Scott, Jr. as well as the sculptor.
In July 1919, in part largely to the leadership of Gov. Charles Brough and First Lady Anne Roark Brough, the Arkansas General Assembly approved the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, making Arkansas the 12th state of the 36th needed.
Two years earlier, Arkansas had given women the right to vote, but only in party primaries. This was not the first attempt at granting Arkansas women the vote. In 1868, a bill was introduced to allow voting regardless of gender but it failed.
As throughout the United States, the efforts to establish women’s suffrage in Arkansas began prior to the Civil War. By 1869, articles started appearing in local newspapers about women’s suffrage efforts. In 1881, the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association had been founded. The Arkansas Equal Suffrage Association was created in 1888. Both of these early groups disbanded when their leaders died. However they planted the seeds for future efforts.
The Political Equality League was founded in Little Rock in 1911. That year an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution was proposed which would have granted women the right to vote. While it failed, the effort created momentum, and women’s suffrage leagues were created throughout Arkansas which led to ultimate victory in 1919.
DeDecker’s sculpture features Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Alice Paul, and Ida B. Wells, all national leaders in the Women’s Suffrage movement.
It also features two Arkansas women who played important roles: Josephine Miller Brown and Bernie Babcock.
This sculpture features two Arkansas women: Josephine Miller Brown and Julia Burnell “Bernie” Babcock. Brown came to Arkansas to work on the woman’s suffrage movement and decided to make it her home, while Babcock grew up in the state and learned about the suffrage effort as a teenager. Both have descendants in Arkansas to this day. This duo were chosen to represent the many women who worked on the suffrage movement. Some were from Arkansas, others came here–all of them worked for decades in this state to advance the cause of women’s suffrage.
Other courageous women who were part of the decades-long women’s suffrage effort in Arkansas include: Frances Reeve Edmonson Almand, Freda Hogan Amerigner, Dr. Ida Joe Brooks, Mary Ascena Burt Brooks, Anne Wade Roark Brough, Haryot Holt Cahoon, Florence Lee Brown Cotnam, Cate Campbell Cuningham, Eliza Bradshaw Dodge, Mary Fletcher Drennan, Pauline Floyd, Elizabeth Wallin Foster, Minnie Ursula Oliver Rutherford Fuller, Lizzie Dorman Fyler, Mary Knapp, Mary W. Loughborough, Clara Alma Cox McDiarmid, Josephine Irvin Harris Pankey, Charlotte Andrews Stephens, Adolphine Fletcher Terry, and Gertrude Watkins.
Little Rock Culture Vulture 