Pablo Picasso, La Colombe 9 janvier 1949. (C) 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
LOUISVILLE, KY – Tickets are now on sale for the upcoming exhibition Picasso: From Antibes to Louisville presented by UPS. The show will open at KMAC Museum in downtown Louisville on December 14, 2019.
Picasso: From Antibes to Louisville, running through March 22, 2020, will bring together approximately 50 ceramics and works on paper created by Pablo Picasso between 1931 and 1956. these works are part of the collection of the Musee Picasso in Antibes, France, and the exhibition is one that has never before been seen outside of Europe.
In what is being billed as “The first exhibition to examine Kentucky’s relationship to the horse through art”, the Speed Art Museum is excited to unveil their latest exhibit, Tales from the Turf. Featuring paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints, and manuscripts that all tell the story of the horse in the Bluegrass State, be sure to check it out when you can. It runs through March 1, 2020. The exhibition reflects all the ways that images of the horse have represented the Commonwealth’s identity, history, mythology, and agricultural economy, from its earliest days through the mid-twentieth century.
The great reviews for PNC Broadway in Louisville’s Dear Evan Hansen keep flooding in and you have until Sunday, October 6th to see what the buzz is all about. The winner of six Tony Awards, including best musical, is leading audiences through a mix of emotions and inner fulfillment when the final curtain calls.
The show is not only popular in Louisville, but has been blazing the box office across America and welcomed its one millionth guest at the October 4th performance at The Kentucky Center for the Arts.
The question counts among the more common ones Kasey Maier encounters when talking to people about Waterfront Botanical Gardens.
I don’t really care much about plants, the inquiry goes. Why would I come?
Maier, president of the Gardens and a leader of the development of the new Louisville landmark since 2013, has a ready answer.
“I say, ‘Would you come to hear the orchestra? Would you come to see the ballet perform? Or to hear some kind of musical performance or see some visual art?’”
It usually does the trick and gives Maier, a Louisville native, another opportunity to share her love of arts culture, our city, botany and her plan to orchestrate them into the kind of experience she describes as “3-D.”
“As a leader of this project, plants are extremely important to me,” she said in a recent phone interview, wedged into a calendar packed with pre-opening tasks. “They are No. 1. However, it’s a more in-depth experience, a more meaningful experience, if you’re surrounded by art at the same time.”
She credits her love of the arts to the exposure provided by long-ago field trips when she and her fellow students “were forced on a bus” and taken downtown for performances.
“I still have the love for the orchestra today because I did that as I child. Same with the ballet. I still support the ballet.”
Maier has already taken advantage of the opportunity to cross-pollinate. Each of the five annual Prelude events so far has featured the Louisville Ballet. Teddy Abrams has performed at two. So has Louisville musical prodigy Ben Sollee.
It’s all led up to a grand opening that will feature ten days of events designed to appeal to people of all ages, beginning with a morning ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 4. She’s eager for people to see what they’ve finished for Phase 1 for the 23-acre facility.
“The Botanical Gardens is first of all a cultural asset for Louisville, so people who support the arts understand the importance of culture in the city,” she said. “I see us as fitting into that matrix of cultural assets for Louisville.”
Visit the Waterfront Botanical Gardens’ website for a complete list of events and details. Also check out information on how you can play a part by volunteering, becoming a member, or participating in other ways to secure funding for the next phase of development.
Opening Week Events
Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony
Friday, October 4, 9 a.m. (Free). Help celebrate the grand opening and dedication of the long-awaited Graeser Family Education Center, the first building of Waterfront Botanical Gardens.
This special event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, but please plan ahead! Parking is extremely limited. Carpooling is recommended. So are TARC routes 15 or 31, biking, walking, or using the trolley shuttle from the field adjacent to Hadley Pottery and the Yellow parking lot on Waterfront Park next to the U of L Rowing club boathouse. The Butchertown Greenway (between River Rd and Story Ave) entrance next to Beargrass Creek will also be open.
Beer and Music in the Gardens
Friday, October, 7 p.m. ($25). Visit Graeser Family Education Center plaza for an evening of live music, featuring performances by Tyler Lance Walker Gill and James Lindsey. Food and local beers from Against the Grain Brewery, Mile Wide Beer Co., Apocalypse Brew Works will be available for purchase. Pets are not permitted at this event. Limited spots available.
Night of a Thousand Flowers Black-Tie Gala
Saturday, October 5, 6 p.m. ($300). Get ready for an unforgettable evening celebrating the opening of Waterfront Botanical Gardens’ first building, The Graeser Family Education Center. Gala Guests will enjoy a seated dinner by Farm to Fork Catering, cocktails, live music by the Delfeayo Marsalis Quintet, and complimentary admission to the Garden After Party. Garden After Party guests will enjoy cocktails, desserts, and live music by Carly Johnson. Limited seats available. You will not receive physical tickets for this event.
Night of a Thousand Flowers After Party with Carly Johnson
Saturday, October 5, 9 p.m. ($100). Garden After Party Guests will enjoy cocktails, desserts, and live music by Carly Johnson. Limited spots are available.
Yoga in the Gardens with Leigh Anne Albrechta
Sunday, October 6, 10 a.m. ($15). Start your day with some yoga in the gardens! Join Leigh Anne Albrechta and fellow participants for an all-level flow in the new Graeser Family Education Center, with views of the surrounding gardens. Bring your own mat!
Speaker Series Luncheons
Monday, October 7-Friday, October 11, 12-1 p.m. ($25 per luncheon)
Monday, October 7: Jon Carloftis: “Gardens of Kentucky: Before and After”
Tuesday, October 8: Steve Bloom: “The Allure of Japanese Gardens: Japan’s Greatest Gift to the World”
Wednesday, October 9: Tom Owen, The Pointe’s Past: Ohio Street Neighborhood to Today’s Botanical Gardens
Thursday, October 10: Tavia Cathcart Brown, Winged Landscapes—Birds, Butterflies and Insects
Friday, October 11: Joan Calder, Airplanes in the Garden—A Lesson from the Gardener
Fifth Annual reGeneration Fair
Saturday, October 12, 2–5 p.m. (Free; $10 suggested donation). Join us on the plaza of the Graeser Family Education Center for our annual, free, family-friendly environmental fair and Plein Air Paint Out with Louisville Visual Art. The fair features food, drinks, music, activities for kids, and more.
First Annual Bug Ball
Saturday, October 12, 5–7 p.m. (FREE for kids 12 and under, $10 per adult, $10 per family). Join us in the Graeser Family Education Center for our first-ever Bug Ball for kids! There will be bug-themed snacks and entertainment, along with music and dancing. So make a BEE-LINE to this fun celebration and help us close out our grand opening week of festivities! Bug costumes STRONGLY encouraged.
The exchange of dialogue between two of the three characters of Hype Man: a break beat play hits like a gut-punch when its deployed by Idris Goodwin’s script to set up the second act of his microcosm of racial tensions in the era of Black Lives Matter.
The trio represent a Goldilocks-esque set of perspectives on excessive police force against African-Americans and what to do it about it. Too cold? Too hot? Is “just right” even possible in the era of double-down politics?
Pinnacle (Shane Kenyon), a white rapper in the style of an up-and-coming Eminem, is the most reluctant to take a controversial stand among the small, up-and-coming hip-hop group. Verb (Mykele Deville) is an appropriate stage name for a man who is about action at almost any cost. A black man, he is red-hot to use their increasing fame to speak out against the police shooting of an unarmed minority motorist named Gerrod, which sets up the conflict for the play. Peep One (Angelica Santiago) is a mash-up of ethnicities, unwilling even to open the results of a DNA test that could illuminate her racially diverse background. Vacillating between a seemingly incompatible desire to propel reform and a passion to grow her solo career as a beat-maker, her dilemma stands in for the kind of moral ambiguity that confounds many who don’t have to worry about Driving While Black yet struggle with what to do about the phenomenon.
Hype Man: a break beat play.
by Idris Goodwin
Directed by Jess McLeod
Through October 13, 2019 Go here for tickets and more information
The play is a series of varyingly intense conversations punctuated by brief exposures to the group’s performances, first on The Tonight Show and then in concert. Both are knocked off stride by Verb, the hype man, a position in a hip-hop group intended to amplify the message of the lead performer with his own dynamic physicality and verbal reactions to it. He cannot, it seems, stop himself from hyping the injustice of Gerrod’s death, and his resolve threatens to destroy everything the three have tried to build.
His protests are well intended but set up trouble with the group’s sponsors and jeopardize Pinnacle’s trajectory, already challenged as he confronts rejection from all sides as a white man trying to make it in a black man’s world. How far can Pinnacle go to accommodate the activism of his childhood friend and now music partner without permanently alienating one of the constituencies he needs to maintain street cred, sell records and book concerts?
Ultimately, it’s up to Peep to set the rhythm for both the tracks Pinnacle performs and the maintaining of the dynamic among them (if doing so is possible) as they navigate loyalties to art, fame, justice and, most complicated of all, friendship.
Director Jess McLeod does an admirable job keeping the small cast moving and enlarging the action so that the approximately 90-minute play feels larger in scope than what those elements might suggest. The musical numbers provide welcome relief, keeping the play from becoming too dense on ideology; I’ll leave it to hip-hop devotees to judge whether the performances pass muster. But the greatest moves may be those of playwright Goodwin. Without once letting his characters devolve into preaching or smacking the audience in the collective noggin with a Message, he manages to present evenly for our judgment various perspectives on how the woke world ought to respond to BLM. The play, then, is not so much about the villain, or even how to defeat him, but when and how it may be best to take him on.
“Dive Bar Saints” is the title track in Home Free’s latest album, released in September of this year. The band’s rich, Southern harmonies come from their four vocalists (Tim Foust, Rob Lundquist, Austin Brown, Adam Chance) and beatboxer Adam Rupp.
Now, Home Free is bringing their new and older music to The Brown Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2019, at 8 p.m. With praise rolling in from the likes of Rolling Stone, Country Living, Perez Hilton, FOX & Friends, and AXS.com, the extraordinary showmen electrify crowds with a one-of-a-kind live show, mixing Nashville standards, soaring originals, and quick-witted humor that brings audiences to their feet with energy and laughter.
