Tag Archives: Arkansas Arts Center

A Princess, a Prince and a Pea at the AAC

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The Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre marches into the new month with a new take on an old tale.  The AAC revisits the Hans Christian Andersen classic The Princess and the Pea.  Alan Keith Smith wrote the adaptation and Artistic Director Bradley Anderson directs this production.

In Smith’s take on the classic tale, there is an added twist of mistaken identity as the Princess’ servant is thought to be the actual Princess.  Though there are new twists, this story still has a Prince, a Queen, twenty mattresses and one tiny pea.

The cast is led by Rachel Haislip as Princess Cordelia, Lucy Miller as her servant Jane, Jeremy Matthey as Prince Perry, Aleigha Morton as Queen Perimeta, John Isner as Womlitt, Michael Pere as Count Quint and Brooke Melton and Rachel Caffey as servants.  Though a play, it features a musical score by Lori Isner.

The Princess and the Pea opened public performances on Friday and runs through March 24.  During Spring Break week, there will be special matinees at 2pm from March 19 through 22.

While at the Arkansas Arts Center, visitors can also check out numerous outstanding exhibits including Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass and Wendy Maruyama: Executive Order 9066.  Dr. Todd Herman is the Executive Director of the Arkansas Arts Center.

HEART/HAND: an architectural lecture by Billie Tsien

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TseinThis month, the Architecture and Design Network features Billie Tsien, AIA, NCAARB, FAAR of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects of New York City.

Ms. Tsien’s lecture will take place tonight in the Arkansas Arts Center lecture hall.  Her remarks will begin at 6pm following a reception at 5:30.

Born in Ithaca New York, Billie Tsien received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Yale and her Master in Architecture from UCLA. Currently, in addition to practicing, teaching and lecturing, she serves on the advisory council for the Yale School of Architecture. In 2007 Tsien was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Tsien and her husband Tod Williams have been working together since 1977. Their firm, which operates out of a small, unpretentious studio on Central Park South in New York City, has earned wide acclaim for its work. This past December, the American Institute of Architects awarded the firm its prestigious 2013 Architecture Firm Award in recognition of work that “reveals a contemporary sensibility and intelligence.” Given annually, the award is the highest honor the AIA bestows on a firm. It recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least ten years.

Their recently completed, 93,000 square foot museum in Philadelphia, designed for the Barnes Foundation, has drawn critical acclaim from many sources. In January, the AIA gave it a 2013 Institute Honor Award for Architecture. The new facility replaces the original one in Merion, Pennsylvania, established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922. A challenge to its designers was to replicate the original 12,000 square foot main gallery, replete with art as arranged by the late Dr. Barnes himself. And they did.

Supporters of the Architecture and Design Network, a non-profit organization, include the Arkansas Arts Center, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

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.

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.

Reed Kroloff: CHANGING THE WORLD: ONE INSTALLATION AT A TIME

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kroloffTonight at 6pm, architect Reed Kroloff will give a presentation entitled “Changing the World: One Installation at a Time.” This is part of the ongoing lecture series by the Architecture and Design Network.

Since 2007, architect Reed Kroloff has been the director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum, a graduate school of arts and design which prides itself on being a community. Cranbrook has been home to such luminaries as Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind. Florence Knoll, Tod Williams and Toshiko Takiezu – to name a few.

This past year Kroloff served as a member and chair of the jury that selected the prize winners of the 2012 design competition sponsored by the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects

Supporters of the lecture series include the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, The Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Arkansas Arts Center.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information e-mail Projects4pi@mac.com.
Date: Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013
Time: 6 p.m., preceded by a reception at 5:30 p.m.
Place: Arkansas Arts Center lecture hall

3 Pigs and 3 Goats Up Next at AAC Children’s Theatre

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Two childhood tales of animal sibling trios are combined in the latest offering of the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre.  Opening tomorrow night, The Three Little Pigs and Three Billy Goats Gruff is a witty musical production full of whimsy that takes its audience to a magical land where pigs and goats talk, trolls reside under bridges, and wolves huff and puff.

The play, written by Children’s Theatre Associate Director Keith Smith, opens with the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The three young goats are grazing in Gruff Valley, but wonder if the grass really is greener on the other side of the bridge. They have heard tales of greener pastures, but exploration to those lands is hindered by a troll that lives under the bridge. The three goats hatch a plan to
defeat the troll, giving him the “what-for,” and earning passage to the luscious lands beyond. They carry out their plan, but find some surprising truths along the way.

On the other side of the troll’s bridge, meadows are lush and pigs live in houses! The second part of the play focuses on another famous set of siblings: the three pigs. After Mama Pig sends out the three piglets to find their own way in the world, each decides on a different way to establish their new life. Dennis, the Big Bad Wolf, is just as interested in how each decides to construct their new home as he is in Grandpa Bill’s famous recipe for piggy pie. The classic story provides the basis for this retelling, but the characters are sure to provide a new form of entertainment for both the young and young-at-heart.

The production runs from January 25 through February 10.  Public performances take place on Friday evenings at 7pm, Saturday afternoons at 3pm and Sunday afternoons at 2pm.

Bradley Anderson is the Artistic Director of the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre.  Dr. Todd Herman is the Executive Director of the Arkansas Arts Center.

 

55th Delta Exhibition at Ark Arts Center

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The 55th Annulal Delta Exhibition officially opens today at the Arkansas Arts Center in the Winthrop Rockefeller Gallery. The Delta runs through March 10.

Since 1958, the Delta has grown into one of the most anticipated Arkansas Arts Center exhibitions of the  year!

It actually predates the opening of the Arkansas Arts Center but was originally presented at the time the plans for the Arts Center were being finalized.

This juried exhibition features innovative and provocative two and three-dimensional works in all media. Each year, more than 900 entries are received from artists who live in or were born in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee or Texas.

A guest juror selects works for the exhibition and a Grand Award and two Delta Awards for the top works in the show.  The Delta represents the dynamic vision of the artists of the Mississippi Delta region and offers visitors a glimpse into the contemporary art scene.

This year’s Delta is sponsored by Dianne and Bobby Tucker and the Munro Foundation.  The Grand Award is supported by The John William Linn Endowment Fund.  The Exhibition is supported by the Andre Simon Memorial Trust in memory of everyone who has died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

The juror for the 55th Delta is Monica Bowman.  She is the owner of The Butcher’s Daughter contemporary art gallery in Detroit, Michigan. Since 2008, she has curated over 20 exhibitions in Detroit and New York. Her gallery regularly participates in the PULSE contemporary art fairs. The gallery has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and W Magazine. Bowman teaches Business Practices for Fine Artists at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. She earned her M.A. in Museum Studies from Georgetown University with a specialization in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. Bowman will select the artworks to be exhibited and assign the $2500 Grand Award and two $750 Delta Awards.