MFP Contributor
“Leonardo Drew: City in the Grass,” on view through Feb. 21, is a sculpture that beckons to be touched, sat on, walked around (even upon) and inspected up close and personal. Like a magic carpet ride, it can whisk the imagination off on a journey where viewers can roam, loom over, lounge around and hang out in the cityscape, interacting directly with it.
The professional theater’s new Solo Show Series finds a way, highlighting veteran New Stage actors and Mississippi stories, still selling tickets and staying mindful of pandemic-related precautions.
His new thriller “Pearl River Mansion” is a fast-paced, occasionally over-the-top tale of big wealth, bigger family dysfunction, death, coverup, some ravenous alligators and the unlikely heroes who can find justice somewhere in that mix.
Ann Abadie of Oxford has won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2020 Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award, although she favors a background role. She was deeply embedded in the founding of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, associate editor of “The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” and “The Mississippi Encyclopedia” and more.
In a pandemic season of closed theaters, New Stage Theatre in Jackson redesigned and rescued its three-week summer day camp, albeit with fewer than half its usual number of participants.
“Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Their Times: The Mellon Collection of French Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” showcases 74 works by famous French artists.
“It’s sort of on-demand … basically like a DVR. It lets people have a live experience, but if they don’t have time, they don’t have to miss it.”
Roy Tamboli’s large-scale abstract paintings grab the eye and don’t let go, pulling it along on a buzzy trip of color, energy, whirls and swirls.
A purple boa curls into a feathery collar on the cover of Elizabeth McCain’s new book—a whimsical nod to her knowing half-smile, her extrovert nature and a pivotal moment that preceded her life as a lesbian. The boa shows up early in her just-published memoir, “A Lesbian Belle Tells: OUTrageous Southern Stories of Family, Loss, and Love,” as a prop in a ploy that goes maddeningly sideways.
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