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Top Ten Art Stories of 2007
December 28th, 2007
by Andy Graham
There are 204 arts organizations and individual artists currently featured on the bloomingtonarts. info Web site directory, sponsored by the city and the Bloomington Area Arts Council, and even that is an incomplete list.
It is no accident that the BAAC dispersed three times the number of Indiana Arts Commission grants, and more than three times as much money per capita, than did its Indianapolis counterpart this year.
Suffice to say, then, that picking a Top 10 among 2007 arts events for the Hoosier Times coverage area is a daunting and inevitably subjective task.
Do we, for example, list the always spectacular Lotus Festival, which started its 2007 festivities with a Buskirk-Chumley appearance by actorsongwriter Jeff Daniels? Or do we focus on events more unique to 2007?
Do we fudge a bit and expand the list to 12 or to a baker’s dozen 13?
Well, no, top 10 means top 10. And we’ll try to keep it unique to 2007. So here is our 2007 Top 10 Arts Events list, in chronological order:
• David Halberstam’s sold-out lecture at the Buskirk-Chumley. March 19. Pulitzer Prizewinning author Halberstam, whose reporting on the Vietnam War helped put that conflict into context for many Americans, talked to his Bloomington audience primarily about his misgivings regarding the war in Iraq. The author of 20 books offering in-depth analysis on the 1950s, the Civil Rights movement, the end of the Cold War and so many other topics germane to the American experience died in a San Francisco car crash just a month after his visit to Bloomington.
• Brown County’s “Art Colony of the Midwest Centennial Celebration.” March 29. The celebration got under way with a full day of activities in downtown Nashville and environs. Related events continued throughout 2007. The centennial celebration saluted painter Theodore Clement Steele’s move to Brown County, where he was subsequently joined by a confederation of friends who became the “Hoosier Group” of American impressionists who founded the Brown County Art Gallery Association in 1926, and the continuation of the legacy by the country’s approximately 225 current resident artists.
• Joshua Bell joins Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music faculty. May 3. Bloomington native Bell, while continuing to tour the world as one of its pre-eminent violinists, will also serve his alma mater as a pedagogue. Bell’s year was also highlighted by receiving the prestigious, $75,000 Avery Fisher Prize on April 10 in New York City, and celebrating the birth of his son, Josef Matricardi Bell, July 31. The boy was named for Bell’s late IU mentor, Josef Gingold, and his mother is Bell’s friend and former girlfriend, violinist Lisa Matricardi.
• The Wilderness Plots show. May 19. Singer-songwriters Krista Detor, Tim Grimm, Carrie Newcomer, Tom Roznowski and Michael White performed homespun songs inspired by tales from IU professor and renowned author Scott Russell Sanders’ 1983 book, “Wilderness Plots.” Sanders also did stage readings between songs before an appreciative packed house at the Buskirk-Chumley. The book is composed of 50 vignettes featuring real Ohio Valley frontier people from the post-Revolution period of history, and the five local songwriters used characters and elements from Sanders’ book to write 19 original songs for a “Wilderness Plots” CD.
• The Indiana University Art Museum celebrates its 25th anniversary. June 10. The museum, designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei, marked its first quarter century with a pair of special exhibits, “A Building Lives” and “Architecture, Real and Imagined.” Then, on Oct. 22, National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Bruce Cole delivered an address and a site-specific work of art, “Light Totem” by IU professor Rob Shakespeare, was unveiled.
• Miah Michaelsen’s shift from the Bloomington Area Arts Council to city hall and Pamela Keech’s subsequent arrival at the BAAC. July 1. The move by Michaelsen, former director of the Bloomington Area Arts Council, made arts an official part of the city’s economic development wing and paved the way for Keech to take over at the BAAC in her stead. Michaelsen, as Bloomington’s assistant director of economic development for the arts, will shepherd the formative Bloomington Economic and Arts District (BEAD) and help coordinate arts projects along in the B-Line Trail corridor. Keech, former curator of Manhattan’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum since 1993 and an award-winning artist, brought a wealth of expertise to she officially s t a r ted at her new post Sept. 1.
• The Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Amos Lee homecoming concert at IU’s Assembly Hall. Oct. 19. It’s hard to imagine IU’s Memorial Union Board securing much bigger names in rock history for the first major concert in Assembly Hall since John Mellencamp’s appearance nearly five years before. After an engaging opening set by Lee, Costello galvanized the crowd with just an acoustic guitar and several of his greatest songs, then gave way to a man whose repertoire of songs is unrivaled. Dylan’s voice was shot, but his band was not, and his spirit was willing.
• The Governor’s Arts Awards, Oct. 25. The ceremonies, conducted outside Indianapolis for the first time in the 36-year history of the awards, featured Bloomington and IU ties among three of the six recipients: IU professor and pianist Menahem Pressler, IU alumnus and saxophonist-educator Jamey Aebersold and IU alumnus Henry Leck, a Butler University professor and conductor of the Indianapolis Children’s Choir. Local artist Karen Green Stone designed the awards.
• IU’s Jacobs School of Music receives $44 million gift from Lilly Endowment. Dec. 12. The money, which came in conjunction with $25 million for the IU School of Law, will facilitate Jacobs adding a new state-of-theart North Studio Building for technologically and acoustically superior practice and rehearsal space, plus offices for faculty. And the money should help IU attract even more high-end faculty, complementing and building upon the $40.6 million transforming gift from David H. and Barbara Jacobs in 2005 which has endowed scholarships, faculty positions and fellowships.
• John Mellencamp announced as member of the 2008 class to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Dec. 13. Mellencamp actually leaked the happy news at a concert prior to the official announcement that he was part of a class including Madonna, Leonard Cohen, the Ventures and the Dave Clark Five to be inducted March 10 in New York City. It capped a great year for The Coog who, among other things, saw his hit single (and ubiquitous Chevrolet commercial theme) “Our County” nominated for a Grammy and served as the headliner for an Indianapolis show at Monument Circle to kick of the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four.