You Go Girl, by Missionary Mary Proctor, is one of the works that
will be in the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s Outsider Visions: Self-Taught
Southern Artists of the 20th Century.
By Greg Stepanich
To walk in on the office of the Arts Garage in downtown Delray Beach these days is to see the familiar signs of creative chaos that bespeak an energetic enterprise in progress: heaps of papers, clusters of wires, takeout coffee cups.
In its short lifespan, the arts organization outgrowth of the Creative City Collaborative has made vigorous use of its space in the city parking garage building at 180 N. First St., most notably with a twice-monthly jazz concert series that has drawn some of the best-known South Florida jazz performers to the Garage, and to what Executive Director Alyona Ushe calls a “phenomenal” response.
That series is pretty well sketched out through the end of the year — rising Boca Raton vocalist Chloe Dolandis will star in the Garage’s New Year’s Eve celebration — but late last month the group added Classical Explosion, a series of chamber music concerts done in tandem with the South Florida Symphony, formerly the Key West Symphony.
It’s all part of the growth of the Garage, Ushe (pronounced Ahsh) says.
“The idea for the Arts Garage has always been interdisciplinary. The classical component has always been a part of our programming,” said the Russian-born Ushe, who came to the Garage from the New Orleans Opera. “We started the jazz to experiment, and then we didn’t want to take too much on when we first opened our doors. We wanted to focus on getting the jazz off the ground. But while we were doing that, we were thinking about what else we could bring to the table.”
In addition to the South Florida Symphony, which is scheduled to perform three concerts at Old School Square’s Crest Theatre (Dec. 4, Jan. 29 and March 11), the Garage will be working with Jon Robertson, who leads the Lynn University Conservatory of Music, and the Palm Beach Opera, whose members will perform a season-preview concert in December.
This month, musicians from the South Florida Symphony will perform the String Quintet in C (D. 956) of Franz Schubert, as well as the C major Quintet of Luigi Boccherini, on a concert set for Sunday, Sept. 11. Jace Vek, an Emmy-winning composer now resident in Delray Beach, offers his Buddha Sky music exposition on Sept. 17, and on Sept. 18, singers Edwin Cahill and Julia Kogan present an evening of songs by Kurt Weill, spanning the German composer’s output from Weimar to Broadway and Hollywood.
That’s in addition to the ongoing Jazz Project, which brings vocalist Nicole Yarling to the Garage on Sept. 10 and singer Debbie Orta on Sept. 24. Ushe says the ultimate goal of the organization is nothing less than artistic freedom.
“The mission … is to create a venue where artists really want to experiment and blossom,” she said. “I don’t want to do strange things for the sake of doing strange things, but if there’s logic and meaning and passion involved, absolutely.”
For tickets, visit artsgarage.eventbright.com; for more information about Arts Garage, visit www.delraybeacharts.org or call 245-0180.
The actress Karen Stephens, who last month played Lorraine Hansberry in a Women’s Theatre Project mounting of Ann Davidon’s Chitterling Heights, returns to her Carbonell-nominated performance in Sarah Jones’ Bridge and Tunnel at the Boca Raton Theater Guild this month.
Bridge and Tunnel, which was first produced by Meryl Streep and won a special Tony in 2006, is a tour de force of acting and accent chops in which Stephens plays 14 characters from New York City’s outer boroughs who have gathered in a Queens theater basement for a poetry jam. The characters include a Chinese woman whose lesbian daughter is having a relationship crisis, an aging Jewish grandmother, a Jordanian woman obsessed with The Beatles, and a wheelchair-bound Mexican man.
Jones’ play is about the immigrant experience, and about the least-heard voices in the national conversation. Stephens won warm reviews for her performance of the piece in December 2009 at the Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, and in October 2010 at the Women’s Theatre Project, which performs in Fort Lauderdale.
The Theatre Guild shows are set for Sept. 9-11 at the Willow Theatre in Boca Raton’s Sugar Sand Park. Performances are at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 9; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 11. Tickets are $15; call 347-3948. Visit www.brtg.org.
Art notes: The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach will be closed from Sept. 12 to Sept. 30 while workers reinstall galleries. Museum officials said the rehanging will give visitors “a more engaging experience” with its collections. The first new exhibit, debuting Nov. 3, will be American artist Dave Cole’s installation Flags of the World. … Three new exhibits open at the Boca Raton Museum of Art this month, including portraits from the museum’s collection (Sept. 6-May 13), and work by the Colombian conceptual artist Federico Uribe (Sept. 21-Dec. 4). Also opening Sept. 21 is Outsider Visions: Self-Taught Southern Artists of the 20th Century, a collection of 75 works by creators such as Mose Tolliver (aka Mose T) and the remarkable Howard Finster. The show closes, fittingly enough, on Jan. 8, the birthday of another self-taught Southerner, Elvis Presley.
Greg Stepanich is the editor/founder of the Palm Beach ArtsPaper, available online at www.palmbeach artspaper.com.
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