2004 VISIONS THAT WERE NOT TO BE
2007
“A series of recent property acquisitions on Main Street in downtown Little Rock can be traced to financier Warren Stephens, and sources close to the transactions confirm that they are part of a $100 million strategy to transform the neighborhood,” Warwick Sabin reported in the July 9, 2004, issue. One person familiar with the project said that Stephens is prepared to make a $100 million investment to create a theater and arts district that would have as its core a new home for the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. This person, who did not want to be identified, said discussions were ongoing with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock about allowing the Theatre Arts and Dance Department to relocate to the current Rep complex, which is on Main between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Another focal point of development is the Center, an old movie house on Main Street between Fourth Street and Capitol Avenue that Stephens has begun renovating for use as a combination restaurant and theater. The Rep failed to get a grant from the Reynolds Foundation that would have allowed its move farther north on Main Street, and Stephens eventually razed the Center Theater. ...
2005
TAKING ON THE COASTAL ELITES BOOK BANNING
Laurie Taylor (later Laurie Masterson and now Laurie Lee) generated a boatload of controversy in her ultimately unsuccessful quest to get a list of more than 50 books removed or restricted from Fayetteville school libraries, Doug Smith reported in the Sept. 30, 2005, issue. Among the books on her list: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and Judy Blume’s “Forever.” “Every one of those 54 books has multiple [offensive] passages,” she said in an interview. “I’m talking about a plethora of verbiage, most of it gutter language, on all sorts of sexual behavior, on bestiality, on incest, on homosexuality.” A student should not be reading such a book without the knowledge of his or her parents, she says. “Why would any conscientious adult have a problem with that? I’m having a hard time conceptualizing why anybody would object.” Lee used the controversy as a springboard into a career in politics, advocating, among other things, for the so-called school reform movement.
In the June 7, 2007, issue, Leslie Newell Peacock defended Alice Walton’s work-in-progress Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art from coastal critics. The museum opened Nov. 11, 2011, to rapturous critical acclaim: Just because billionaire Alice Walton was raised in the hills of Arkansas does not mean she is the wrong person to build a great museum of American art. Just because her museum will be located in Bentonville and not on either coast does not mean that Americans will be deprived of beloved historical paintings. Those who knitted their eyebrows at the news that a first class museum of American art would arise in the Ozarks might want to consider this: Bentonville has an airport. They can use it. New York art critics who beat their breasts over losing Arthur Durand’s Hudson Valley masterpiece “Kindred Spirits” to the boonies (one writer said Walton had “raided” the New York Public Library to get her hands on it) should take a look around at the art looted from abroad in their own museums. And those who criticize Alice Walton because the money she’s investing in art derives from her interest in the world’s biggest and often-criticized retailer should consider: How many fortunes that helped build the nation’s museums were made in a socially laudable way? Do they avoid the Whitney because of Mrs. Whitney’s mother-in-law’s ties to Standard Oil? (Should we shun the Arkansas Arts Center, once propped up by Winthrop and Jeannette Rockefeller, for the same reason?) … ARKANSASTIMES.COM
SEPTEMBER 2019 53