by | Mar 26, 2024 4:32 pm | Comments (0)
Contributed photos
Exquisite Creatures
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, Arkansas
Through July 29, 2024
Artist and naturalist Christopher Marley pursued rare animals, reptiles and insects to the ends of the earth to create the new exhibit Exquisite Creatures at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
by | Feb 22, 2024 4:45 pm | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier photos
Raeden Greer (left), director of The Hill We Climb, and Lara Hill, director of How Do I Tell You This.
El Dorado Film Festival
South Arkansas Arts Center
El Dorado, Arkansas
Feb. 8 – 11, 2024
Independent filmmakers converged on the El Dorado Film Festival in Arkansas to show their work and collaborate on future projects. Doc Martens boots were de rigueur, and a New Haven producer’s movie won honorable mention.
Continue reading ‘El Dorado Film Fest Shows Triumphs, Struggles Of Indie Movie Makers’
by | Dec 15, 2023 11:37 am | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier Photo
Sawyer Hill
Meteor Guitar Gallery
Bentonville, Ark.
Dec. 8, 2023
Alt-rock singer Sawyer Hill has a new band, new songs and 70,000 followers on TikTok. Headlining a near-capacity concert at the Meteor Guitar Gallery in Bentonville, he played to a hometown crowd with fan enthusiasm approaching mass contagion.
by | Nov 20, 2023 10:51 am | Comments (0)
Heli Mistry Photo
Artist Amos Cochran.
N.I. (Natural Intelligence) by Amos Cochran
The Momentary
Bentonville
Closed Nov. 12
Composer and video artist Amos Cochran’s multimedia installation at the Momentary in Bentonville rebels against the onslaught of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Projected onto a six-story building, the outdoor exhibit is titled N.I. (Natural Intelligence). Cochran’s portentous musical score and rave-like light show reflect AI’s unsettling effects on the world.
Continue reading ‘The Art of Natural Intelligence – And Why AI Wants Your Job’
by | Nov 6, 2023 3:06 pm | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier photos
Tanya Kaiser.
Día de Muertos Bike Ride
Latinas en Bici
Rogers, Arkansas
Nov. 4, 2023
Tanya Kaiser of Farmington, Arkansas, arrived in style at the finish line of a Día de Muertos annual group ride led by Latinas en Bici, a bicycle-advocacy organization in Northwest Arkansas. She pedaled a Specialized Alias road bike, which features a carbon frame with geometry designed for female athletes.
Continue reading ‘“Latinas en Bici” Roll on Day of the Dead’
by | Oct 31, 2023 10:06 am | Comments (0)
Omnia Vincit Amor or Love Conquers All, the title piece in Kim Seltzer’s one-woman show. 2019, Oil on Cotton, 60" x 30"
Mickey Mercier Photo
Seltzer at her Rogers one-woman show.
The Art of Kim Seltzer: Love Conquers All
Art Collective Gallery
Rogers, Arkansas
Through Nov. 30
Startling portrayals of mythological and historical figures inhabit the otherworldly paintings of Kim Seltzer in Love Conquers All, a one-woman show at the Art Collective Gallery in Rogers.
Continue reading ‘Post-Punk Painter Of Myth And Horror Conquers All’
by | Oct 19, 2023 2:51 pm | Comments (0)
Leibovitz-captured Patti Smith at NYC's Electric Lady Studios in 2007.
Student work by Leibovitz for the San Francisco Art Institute from about 1968, with a blurred self-portrait taken the following year at lower left.
Annie Leibovitz At Work
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville
Through Jan. 29, 2024
Walking through the photography exhibit Annie Leibovitz At Work at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was like a reverie -– a restless dream with images both familiar and strange flickering through the mind like a newsreel.
The pictures by the former Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair photographer portray a half-century of the cooler, weirder sides of culture and history: A 1975 Rolling Stones tour when the band was fresh-faced and hotel rooms were upended. John and Yoko. Richard Nixon and Dr. Hunter S.Thompson. Susan Sontag. The Dalai Lama. Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk. Yo-Yo Ma. Condoleezza Rice. Tom Wolfe. Marvin Gaye. A gaunt, godlike Patti Smith during the Horses tour. Air Force One and Apollo 17. Baryshnikov. Pregnant Demi Moore. Miles Davis. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor. Bare-chested Arnold Schwarzenegger on horseback. Ken Kesey. The siege of Sarajevo, 1993. Andy Warhol focusing a camera. And a blurred self-portrait of Leibovitz herself.
by | Oct 3, 2023 10:35 am | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier Photo
Plant cuttings growing in test tubes at the Botanical pub, which even has its own monogrammed candles with a custom scent. The strawberry rhubarb cream ale is a cask beer made by nearby Bike Rack Brewing.
Botanical at 8th and A
713 SW A St.
Bentonville, Ark.
Fern bars — those 1980s-era drinking establishments decorated with potted plants, green carpeting, fake Tiffany lamps, and plenty of brass fixtures — are nearly extinct today, but a new beer-and-wine pub named Botanical at 8th and A has boosted their DNA through an evolutionary leap. The eco-themed bar in downtown Bentonville features more than 180 plants – living breathing organisms unlike the plastic ones in fern bars. The interior is a lovely re-imagining of the earlier decorative style.
by | Sep 18, 2023 12:17 pm | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier Photos
Tyler Burrell at the Rumble with his 1972 Honda Scrambler. The greasy, dented machine oozes rat-bike style.
Traveling tintype photographer Matthew Nixson.
Hill City Rumble
Prairie Street Live
Fayetteville
Sept. 16
Thirty miles south of where a museum retrospective of Annie Leibovitz photos was opening in Bentonville, a tintype photographer named Matthew Nixson was shooting portraits of tattooed men and women at a vintage motorcycle show.
Nixson, a traveling photographer from Waco, Texas, came to Northwest Arkansas with a portable studio for shooting the sepia-toned tintype portraits in a vendor tent. Business was brisk; customers eagerly posed under bright lights while he ducked under a black shroud to snap their $65 pictures with an antique accordion camera.
by | Sep 13, 2023 3:32 pm | Comments (0)
Mickey Mercier Photo
The $200 Bacon Burger with a rosemary margarita at the Louise gastro-diner.
Amateur pilots love to complain about the “hundred-dollar hamburger.” It’s an in-joke, a wry lament about the high cost of learning to fly small aircraft – the expense of plane rental and fuel for a practice flight to the next small-town airport and a greasy-spoon lunch.
Louise, a gastro-diner with picture windows overlooking the runway at Bentonville Municipal Airport, has modernized the idea with a menu item named “The $200 Bacon Burger” (which actually costs $19). This burger is very good, but that’s not the whole story.
Continue reading ‘Plane Truth Uncovered About That “$200 Burger”’
by | Sep 4, 2023 12:49 pm | Comments (0)
Blew Reed gets the evening rolling.
You can grab one off the wall and start strumming "Walk on the Wild Side."
At the Meteor Guitar Gallery, an up-and-coming music venue in Northwest Arkansas, I was hoping to see a Lou Reed tribute act. The act, a local band audaciously named Blew Reed, was opening a show there recently.
I was mistaken, but not disappointed.
Blew Reed is the stage name of Clint Reaser, a retired machinist from Rogers, Arkansas. He’s the harmonica (reed) player and singer of the four-piece blues-rock group Blew Reed & the Flatheads. And flathead refers not to a punk haircut but an old Ford or Harley motor.
The Meteor is a large music hall in a repurposed movie theater in downtown Bentonville. It includes the Guitar Gallery where you can view a few hundred vintage guitars and even buy them.
Lou Reed is gone, but Meteor owner Leslie Key is dedicated to music with the old-school rock spirit, along with an appreciation for vintage guitars and the gritty bands that play them.
Continue reading ‘Paging Lou Reed, In The City That Birthed Walmart’
by | Sep 1, 2023 8:00 am | Comments (0)
Walking into artist Firelei Báez’s To breathe full and free: a re-visioning, a correction (19°36’16.9“N72°13’07.0“W, 42° 21’48.762″ N 71°1’59.628″ W, 36° 22′ 0.1848’‘ N94° 12′ 8.64’’ W) is like walking into an undersea ruin.The blue tarps overhead refract light onto the ground as if a giant papel picado has been hung across the sky.
by | Aug 10, 2023 9:17 am | Comments (0)
Serena Puang Photo
A Facebook post in a local food group from July 30 asked for “A restaurant that everyone seems to love but you think is actually not that good.” Hot takes abounded: a brunch place named “The Buttered Biscuit” was accused of having bad biscuits. The region was accused of not having a single good Mexican restaurant. One comment sparked a conversation: someone thought my favorite sushi spot, Sushi House, was overrated. And multiple people recommended going to BLU DTR instead.
As a sushi lover and one of Sushi House in Bentonville’s biggest fans, I couldn’t let this go without at least trying the alternative.
by | Aug 1, 2023 2:00 pm | Comments (0)
The outside of the Momentary (a contemporary art space/music venue/coffee shop/bar in Bentonville, Akansas) looks like a shoebox. The building itself is a repurposed cheese plant, and the minimalistic branding and beige walls give no indication of what could be inside.
Soon after you turn the corner from the lobby, you’re faced with ornate text welcoming you into Chicago based artist Yvette Mayorga’s solo exhibition, What a Time to Be. The exhibit radically depicts ordinary life in bubblegum pink, piped acrylic. Inspired by photos of her family posed at home, Mayorga mixes the everyday occurrences like birthday parties, laying down in one’s bedroom and visiting relatives with the style and composition of François Boucher’s French, Rococo-style paintings.
Continue reading ‘In Cheese Plant-Turned Gallery Space, Bubblegum Pink Beckons’
by | Jul 24, 2023 9:46 am | Comments (1)
Rogers, Ark. – Arkansas’ Public Theatre’s production of It Shoulda Been You — featuring an interfaith wedding gone awry, bickering mothers, and an all-knowing, borderline-magical wedding planner — is a joyful farewell to the company’s 37th season, the last before the theater closes for renovation. The play runs weekends through July 30.
Continue reading ‘Rebecca Loves Marty: 8 Years Later, It Shoulda Been You Works Past Stereotypes’
