UALR magazine
Fall/Winter 2007 • Vol. 3 No. 2
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Cross-Pollinating the Arts
By Joan I. Duffy
Forget the old cliché about college students frittering away daddy’s money by majoring in basket weaving.
In 2002 when Alan DuBois, then the curator of the Decorative Arts Museum at the Arkansas Arts Center, began organizing a national conference on basket art, he turned to Brad Cushman, director of UALR’s galleries under the Department of Art, to search for common threads among their respective programming. Cushman had been toying with an idea for exhibiting examples of basket art.
DuBois put Cushman in touch with Rob Coffland, who, with his wife Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, founded the Tai Gallery in Santa Fe. They exhibit work of modern Japanese bamboo artists at major shows and fairs in New York, Palm Beach, San Francisco, and London.
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The collaboration resulted in UALR’s Gallery II exhibition Next Generation-Japanese Bamboo Basketry, presented during the American Arts Council (AAC) Conference DuBois organized in Little Rock. This gave Arkansans the opportunity to feast their eyes on exquisite examples of basket art that sells from $10,000 to $30,000.
“We were able to exhibit some of the most beautiful sculptural baskets I have ever seen — all during the AAC conference,” Cushman said.
That kind of collaboration among the central Arkansas art community is one of the major reasons that Little Rock’s arts scene far exceeds its peer cities, according to Nan Plummer, executive director of the Arkansas Arts Center.
“What is special about Little Rock and its arts community is we are so willing to sit down and talk and share and let cross-pollination happen,” she said.
Some of the collaborations have been big — the 2004 effort to showcase the community for the opening of the Clinton Library with lectures and exhibitions all over town and again in 2007 for the 50th anniversary of the crisis at Central High School. That collaboration resulted in Arts Center works being included in UALR’s Taking Possession exhibition of black artists during the Central anniversary events.
Some of the cooperative efforts have been intimate — pairing an Arts Center exhibition of 18th century etchings of Rome with a Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts production of the opera “Tusca” that included an evening in the museum to view the etchings while singers performed the arias.
Other efforts are an ongoing synergy, such as UALR’s class on museum studies being taught at the Arts Center with Plummer and her senior staff. And when the Arts Center presented a major Picasso show, UALR’s Dr. Floyd Martin, professor of art history, presented a lecture on Picasso at the museum.
Central Arkansas’ cultural community — whose staffs are peppered by talented and disciplined graduates and interns from UALR’s fine arts programs — provide a crucial “recruitment and retention” function in the region’s efforts to grow the economy.
Plummer compared a town’s art institution to church steeples in towns of the Old West.
“If you saw a steeple rise above a town on the frontier, you knew it was a civilized place, it was okay to settle there,” she said. “Having healthy, thriving art institutions is evidence that there is community, that there is philanthropy, that there is education, and that there are shared values in a place.”
Without a strong cultural community, universities, medical schools, and businesses and industries find it difficult to entice top-flight personnel to relocate from major metropolitan areas. Thanks to the creative collaborations among UALR and the region’s arts community, central Arkansas’ economic recruiters have much on which to brag.
“It is an outward sign of an economically viable community,” Plummer said.
A community with a strong artistic component offers more than exhibitions, theater productions, and symphony galas. A creative community means the population is rich with creative people — something companies are hungry for in the digital age, the director said. Employers want people who can learn, innovate, and work together.
Training in the arts is ahead of that curve, Plummer contends. She said musicians, performers, and visual artists are motivated, disciplined, and goal-oriented. They know they are not going to get it right the first time, and they work until the job is done.
“And they are collaborators,” she said. “If you play in an ensemble, if you put on an exhibition, if you share studio space, you are trained to collaborate. You are trained to think in a group.”
Arts institutions may not be as vital to society as food, clothing, and shelter. But they are essential if a community or region is to flourish, Plummer said.
“You have to feed people with more than food,” she expressed. “If you want your population to grow, you have to feed them in all their dimensions. “