One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and Dick Oglesby, 76, has taken the old saying to heart by creating a holiday display consisting of old jewelry donated by the women of Oak Terrace Active Retirement Community, where he also lives. “In June, I asked the activities director to ask the ladies if they had any […]
Arts Features
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The play’s the thing
“My radiation oncologist cruelly resisted my pleas. I begged him to irradiate the unaffected breast so it would be big and perky and glow in the dark like the one they zapped.” — “Degrees of Lucky,” Judith Schlessinger Dyer Judy Dyer, who died of breast cancer earlier this month, left behind a one-act drama about […]
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Decking the Hall
The Springfield Art Association opens its inaugural Holiday Hall Exhibition and Sale this weekend. The event marks a departure from the themes of past holiday exhibitions in favor of a fine-crafts sale for shoppers. Typically SAA’s juried exhibits draw works from artists all over the Midwest, but for the Holiday Hall, the SAA chose the […]
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Giving fellow artists a boost
When Rob and Michele DeLong ventured downtown for the celebrated Old Capitol Art Fair, they saw something that sparked their interest: a “For Lease” sign. After some thinking, the married photographers decided to take down the sign and replace it with their own, advertising the RMD Gallery. The 2,000-square-foot art space and framing studio on […]
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Where the art meets the road
Paintings by Springfield’s Mary Ellen Strack and photographs by Carlinville’s Karl Warma are featured, along with works by other area artists, at Prairie Art Alliance’s current show 6×6, timed to coincide with the city’s annual Route 66 Festival. “We wanted to take advantage of being in our downtown location and tie in with the festival,” […]
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Who’s the Man?
The Man Who Came to Dinner, the popular comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, opens a five-performance run tonight (Thursday, Sept. 22) at the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Back in 1939, when it premiered at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, audiences knew that the lead character, Sheridan Whiteside, was based on […]
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At the crossroads
In the first half of the 20th century, Springfield’s South Town, a neighborhood defined by the intersection of 11th Street and South Grand Avenue, was a prominent neighborhood shopping center. Boasting restaurants and stores for fine jewelry and furniture, it was prime commercial real estate. South Town was “a city within a city,” according to […]
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Harvest time
The local fall theater season promises everything from Greek drama to 1930s madcap comedy to recent Broadway musicals. Cal Pritner, longtime faculty member of the Illinois State University Department of Theatre and founder of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, performs two one-man plays this weekend: Mark Twain: Unlearning Racism is presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. […]
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Thirty-four winners
Springfield Art Association’s new exhibit of two-dimensional art, organized around the single theme of The Modern Landscape, represents a first for the organization: a show dedicated to Illinois artists. Amanda Lampert, SAA’s curator of collections, credits former executive director Erika Fitzgerald with the idea. “She wasn’t here to see the exhibit through, but I think […]
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Sculpting a career in transition
George Hinds was a recreational sculptor for most of his life until a recent employment “speed bump” prompted him to turn his art into a full-time enterprise. He’s off to a promising start. Along the way to today, Hinds has been a technical illustrator at Fiat Allis, a construction worker, and a coal miner. This […]
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Two weeks to stardom
On a Wednesday afternoon in early July, five teachers huddle in a cluttered second-floor office in the Hoogland Center for the Arts to plan the third and final session of summer theater camp. In a week, the Hoogland will be overrun by dozens of noisy fledging thespians, but on this day, as Jason Goodreau puts […]
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Master of illusion
When a guy from Stratford-upon-Avon, England, began writing plays in London, stages were little more than raised platforms with no “sets” of decorative art conveying a sense of time and place to stories performed by the actors. “Early theater engaged audiences in the willing suspension of disbelief,” explains Ed Smith, a 59-year-old multifaceted thespian. “Clues […]
