Around & About

If you come across any interesting exhibitions, museums or other places on your travels, share them with us. Call 409-838-5393, or contact us through ourwebsite at www.artstudio.org. Be sure to include the location and dates of the subject, as well as any costs.

The ART MUSEUM OF SOUTHEAST TEXAS presents VISIONS FROM GOD,15 paintings by local artist AMY TOLBERT-FAGGARD,on view in Café Arts through Aug. 1.

Tolbert-Faggard is an ethereal painter with a strong passion to pour out her creative energy in the form of still-life paintings and landscapes. Her artwork is largely influenced by Biblical scripture and created to give the viewer a spiritual experience.

“In my art, God’s word along with variations of light, color and perspective are used to create an aesthetic experience allowing the viewer to feel God’s presence,” Tolbert-Faggard said.

“Visions from God” is part of AMSET’s continued mission to feature local artists in Café Arts, museum spokesperson Melissa Tilley said. The exhibition is open for viewing during regular museum hours.

For more information, contact AMSET at 409-8323432 or visit www.amset.org. _______________

The tale of the misfit novice Maria and her thrilled generations of theatergoers since THE SOUND OF MUSIC madeitsBroadway debut in 1959.

Southeast Texans can be a part of the fun this summeras LAMAR STATE COLLEGE-PORT ARTHUR,inconjunction with PORT ARTHUR LITTLE THEATRE,stage this classic family musical.

Auditions will be held at 7 p.m., June 1, 2 and 3 intheLamar Theater on the LSC-PA campus at 1700 Proctor Street and are open to the entire Southeast Texas community, not just LSC-PA students.

“The Sound of Music” will be presented July 29, 30,31,Aug.5,6and7at7:30p.m., and Aug. 1 and 8 at2:30p.m.

The musical, with songs by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, features a host of familiar songs, including “Edelweiss,” “Do Re Mi,” “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” “My Favorite Things” and, of course, the titlesong.

“This is one of the most beloved musicals of all time,”director Keith Cockrell said. “It is a great thrill tobeableto involve people in a show that is so well known. I hope that anyone who has ever wanted to beinamusical will take the opportunity to come out and audition.”

There are lots of adult roles and seven children’s roles, from 18 down to very young. Because of the rigors of rehearsal, Cockrell asks that all children auditioning have finished at least first grade.

Cockrell is especially keen to encourage newcomers to theater to participate.

“Our auditions are as friendly and inclusive as wecan make them,” he said. “We teach the songs there, we give you the pages we want you to read — youdon’t have to spend months getting ready.

“We give you the chance to do it over and over. We try to give everyone the chance to be comfortable and to show us what they can do.”

Cockrell said that he encourages people to attend all three nights of auditions.

“Iwant to see you with everyone I can see you with,” he said. “If someone can’t attend all three nights just tell me and I will give them as much as chance as I can on the nights they can be there.”

Cockrell said being in a show requires commitment,butthe summer musicals produce friendships andbonds that last for years.

Foraudition information, call Cockrell at 409984-6338.

Forreservations, call 409-984-6111. _______________

TRANSITION STILL X by Jacco Olivier

The BLAFFER ART MUSEUM at the University of Houston presents an exhibition featuring Dutch artist JACCO OLIVIER,whose presentation of ten works inaugurates Blaffer’s new “First Take” series. The exhibition is on view through Aug. 7.

Olivier’s luscious filmic vignettes are quiet meditations on painting set in motion. Technically, his work falls into the category of animation. Images are repeatedly reworked and rephotographed to create a narrative that unfolds through a camera-driven progression. Olivier likes to tell a story, but even in his most anecdotal works, the most interesting tale is the story of painting itself.

For each work, Olivier repaints the same canvas over and over again, carefully photographing each stage of development. In time the original image slowly degenerates and finally disappears altogether in the cumulative layers of paint. The final work, the photographic record, thus becomes an animated history of a painting, a slice of time that captures scraps of narrative and memories, and joins them together to form a moving picture with an atmospheric charge enriched by an ambient soundtrack.

Hunger, Birds, Submerge (all 2003), and Hide (2004) delve into the animal realm. The viewer follows apolar bear across snowy plains on his hunt for fish, soars into the sky with a flock of birds, dives into the deep sea, or catches glimpses of a frog alternatively jumping and hiding in a grassy field. Other works, such as Sleep and Normandy (both 2004), serve as meditative windows onto simple moments of daily life: one shows a woman tossing and turning in bed, while in the other she enjoys the breeze on the seashore. In his more recent work, including Bath (2009), Portrait (2009), and Transition (2010), Olivier has mined traditional genres, such landscapes and still lifes, bathers and portraits, often pushing the image to the edge of abstraction. With the new focus on painting as a historical discipline has come a shift in scale that emphasizes the viewer’s relationship to the painting as an object.

Where Olivier’s early films read like intimate, jewel-like visual poems, the new ones add a surprisingly expansive spatial and physical dimension to an otherwise largely immaterial experience of sight and sound.

“First Take,” Olivier’s first solo museum exhibition, brings together ten works created between 2003 and 2010. The artist was born in the Netherlands in 1972. He graduated from the Rijksakademie in 1998, and lives and works in Amsterdam.

“First Take: Jacco Olivier” is on view concurrently with Tomás Saraceno:Lighter than Air.

The Blaffer Art Museum is located at 120 Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston campus.

For more information, call 713-743-9521 or visit www.class.uh.edu/blaffer. adventures with the Von Trapp family singers has

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The Port Arthur Historical Society will host a new traveling exhibition at the MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST.On loan from The Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, BEING ANDY WARHOL features a series of photographs taken by Andy Warhol during the 1970s and 1980s. The photographs illustrate Warhol’s preoccupation with fame, his use of the camera both as a social equalizer and a social diary, the method behind his technical process, and finally, his construction of identity as a commodity.

The exhibition will open with a free reception June 13 at 2 p.m. and will feature a film screening of the 2002 documentary “Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture.”

This exhibition also highlights several core themes found in Warhol’s work: the embrace of consumer culture, explorations of sexual identity, challenges to social and artistic conventions and the integration of high and low culture. Warhol was adamant about documenting the world around him. Through 18 black-and-white photographs we become aware of his private life, his social circle, and the artistic milieu which surrounded him. In 23 Polaroids we become privy to his public persona as image maker but also his working process. His photographs, as well known as the many celebrities who sat for him, reveal a world based on marketable image and personality. Because Warhol not only photographed celebrities, but also such mundane objects as kitchen knives or items at a flea market, we see in him an artist of abundant curiosity with an eye for detail and a knack for articulating his world with uncommon detachment. Warhol is, without a doubt, a conundrum well suited to his time and place in international art history.

“Being Andy Warhol” will remain on view in the Museum’s Dunn Gallery through Aug. 15.

The museum is located at 700 Procter Street in downtown Port Arthur and is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, call call 409-982-7000 or visit www.museumofthegulfcoast.org.