Highlights
It’s Festival Time
Fall is festival time in the Ozarks. Along with the annual fall craft fairs, which are coming up soon, a couple of new festivals are happening this weekend that should be inspiring.
Twist of Green
The Twist of Green Festival will take place on the Fayetteville Square. The event is described as a “green scene with a twist of creativity to inspire and raise awareness with good, green family fun.”
The event will kick off at 7 p.m. Friday with the Green Bean Ball at the East Square Plaza, formerly the Bank of America building. Greasy Greens, originally scheduled to play, has cancelled, so filling in will be Zydeco band, Snake Eyes and the Bug Band. There will be an auction of sustainable doghouses, doll houses, play houses and cat towers. While most of the activities are free, the Green Bean Ball is a fundraiser. Tickets are $15 adults and $5 children. Wear green.
Booths will be open throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday and there will be speakers discussing sustainable living practices both days at the library and the University of Arkansas Continuing Education Center.
Other highlights include a street dance from 7-9 Saturday night with the jazz, funk sextet The OneUps, an Art Bike Parade on Sunday and a sustainable mini golf course. For a schedule of speakers, children’s workshops and other events go to www.twistofgreen.org.
Here’s a schedule for some of the Saturday and Sunday main stage activities
Saturday
10 a.m. Festival opens with booths and speakers
10:45 a.m. Becky Gillette from Planet Home
11 a.m. Clarke Buehling
11:30 a.m. “Bite Me” a singing skit about vegetables
Noon Children’s Puppet show
2 p.m. Tiffany Christopher
3 p.m. Susan Shore
3 p.m. “An Inconvenient Truth (library)
4 p.m. Cletus Got Shot
6 p.m. John Two Hawks & Van Adams
7 p.m. Street dance with The OneUps
Sunday
11 a.m. Art Bike Parade from the Walton Arts Center
Noon Snake Eyes and the Bug Band
12:45 p.m. Shaky Bugs
1 p.m. Shout Lulu
2 p.m. D West and the New Roots
Coalessence Festival
The Coalessence Festival will open at 3 p.m. Friday and run through Sunday on the 1,600 acre Lake Leatherwood Park near Eureka Springs. Described by organizers as three days of “uplifting the vibration of the planet” with music, health and consciousness, the festival will feature two stages with music, yogis, dancers and speakers. There will also be a healing area with yoga, meditation and Qigong classes along with Reiki and massage.
Speakers include physicist and National Book Award winner Fred Alan Wolf, best known from the movie “What The Bleep Do We Know.” Visionary artist Alex Grey will create one of his paintings as the audience watches. Other speakers include herbalist Dennis McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck who will speak on contemporary Shamanism and John Major Jenkins who will talk on cosmology.
The music will range from reggae, jam, folk and blues to electronic, trance, tribal psychedelic rock, IDM, psy-jazz and Indian. The acts include offspring of two legendary reggae musicians, Bob Marley’s son, Kymani, and Peter Tosh’s son, Tosh 1. Also playing will be Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Rabbit in the Moon, BT, Kan’nal, DJ Spooky, Pnuma Trio, BreakBeatBuddha, Govinda, Alfred Howard & the K23 Orchestra, Jamie Janover, BLVD and MC Souleye, DJ ESP, Jah Roots, Ozakwaba and Opal Fly, Artificial Life Preserver, Damn Bullets, Jah Kings, Grant Hicks, Init String, Gift Culture, Tom Foolery, Free Verse, Seed Love, DJ Spiff, DJ Produce, Doohickey and Vaxanation.
Organic food will be available from The North Star Café.
Tickets range from $21.44 to $101.66. For information go to www.coalessencefest.com or call (479) 253-7060.
Art and Music
Several notable art and music events are taking place this week.
The Walton Arts Center will host the drumming group San Jose Taiko on Friday night and the venerable Itzhak Perlman on Sunday.
The Love Out Loud Art and Music Fest Friday and Saturday at Pontiac Coffehouse in Springdale will feature Listener Project and other band and is a benefit for Artserve and Restore Humanity.
Saturday night Miss Luna Tart from Austin will be at Little Canada house concert at 114 E. Maple in Fayetteville.
On Tuesday night Andrew Sieff will begin a regular Tuesday night jazz show at GoodFolk in Fayetteville.
Be sure and catch the exhibit by Greg Moore at the Botanical Gardens of the Ozarks before it closes on Oct. 12. Moore uses reclaimed surfaces as his palette for his intriguing botanicals.
And what do two real estate agents, an office manager, a sociology instructor, a former math teacher, a faux-finishing specialist, and a former photo editor all have in common? They all share an innate desire to be creative and interpret their world using paint and canvas, or little scraps of paper, or a camera, or clay, or even food. Beyond their everyday lives, careers and jobs, their joy is bringing to life works of art inspired by nature, the texture and colors of different materials, flavorful ingredients, or the beauty and simplicity of objects in their own backyard.
Rhonda Butler, Liz Prados-Cantwell, Cate McCoy, Charlene Schubert, Melanie Norman, Brian N. Chism and Marcella Thompson will join together from 3 -7 p.m. Sunday at the Green Door in Evelyn Hills Shopping Center for a show and sale titled “Art Behind the Green Door”. The show will feature watercolors, acrylics, oils, pastels, photography, graphic imagery, mixed media collage, and food prepared by a culinary artist.
Many of Liz Prados- Cantwells paintings and pastels reflect her love of the Louisiana bayou country where she was born and raised with her sister Melanie Norman. The two of them are active in the Krewe of Olympia and Melanie designs some of the floats for the Fayetteville Mardi Gras parades and paints mainly with watercolor.
For Cate McCoy, painting is an acute awareness of light and movement and the vibrancy of color and textural elements as well as emotion. She feels it is a meditative and spiritual journey that helps to open up her head and her heart.
While Rhonda Butler has at times worked in more traditional media, her more recent work is inspired by her attraction to the textures and colors of a variety of materials. Her multi-media collages feature hand-made paper, paint, clay. metal, wood, and graphic imagery, sometimes all in one piece.
Photographer Brian Chism feels that everyone’s angle, or vision, or perspective is a little different and that his photos are just small, brief comments about how he perceives the world with “one eye shut”. His work captures the elegance of simple everyday objects in black and white.
Working in clay, Marcella Thompson transforms her own love of nature and her work with water gardens and aquatic plants into hand-made tiles which feature water plants, dragonflies, nightscapes and the occasional looking on cat.
Charlene Schubert creates her art in the kitchen. Her passion for food and cooking started when she was young and began hanging out in her Grandmother’s kitchen. As a culinary artist she is happiest when she is in the kitchen preparing meals for loved ones and is fulfilled artistically when her creations are appreciatively consumed by others.
