Art Enthusiasts, History Buffs Revel in Arkansas's Cultural Offerings

Distinctly beautiful, the regions of Arkansas inspire local artists, whose stimulating works can be found in galleries and museums throughout the state, while local orchestras delight listeners with crisp, soul stirring melodies. Performance art thrives on the stages of community theaters that feature local and national talent, and many centers and museums also offer classes on a variety of mediums for children and adults. For history buffs, Arkansas's museums showcase topics spanning the Civil War, desegregation, gangsters, the world's largest corporation and even Ernest Hemingway.

Life Imitates Art
State's like one big gallery to Arkansas Art Center's Nan Plummer

By Jason M. Wiest

On a quiet, intimate street in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the houses sit mere feet apart and Saturday night high school football fans desperate for parking cause the only traffic not tied to the neighborhood, Nan Plummer and her husband, Jim Spencer, walked out their front door for a run. As they started out walking down the sidewalk, a woman who had just parked along the street got out of her car and began walking towards them. And as they passed, Nan and Jim spoke a friendly greeting.

The woman didn't reciprocate. Didn't speak a word. Didn't even look up at them.

"That would never happen in Little Rock. An Arkansan would never do that," Nan told her husband. She'd been commuting back and forth between the family's home in Michigan and Little Rock, where in November 2002 she had taken the job as executive director of the Arkansas Arts Center, the state's only art museum and largest cultural institution known nationally for its exquisite collection of unique works on paper.

Ever since her first visit, Nan was struck by the "proactive friendliness" of the Arkansans she met. The people in the airport, at restaurants – it was like they all felt this camaraderie for anyone they encountered. Soon after, when Jim and their two children followed, this warmness would comfort her again. The move upset her son Bill, who had to leave his friends behind and finish his last two years of high school in a new place. Nan knew everything would be all right, though, when she happened to catch a glimpse of Bill and a new friend hugging outside of school – the same warmth she'd told her family to expect.

But there were more delights to be found in Arkansas. Little Rock was a runner's paradise. Flat stretches, hilly terrain, routes with river views and miles of shaded trails – any type of course you could imagine. Of course, there was plenty of Southern cuisine to taste – "I keep trying catfish," Nan said – but the abundance of restaurants that served delicious sushi was a welcome surprise. And after living here for nearly seven years, Nan, who wrote her dissertation on 18th century Roman ecclesiastical architecture, still finds intrigue in the state's rich array of historic buildings and beautiful architecture, particularly among churches.

The arts and humanities continue to dominate much of Nan and her family's life in Arkansas just as they always have. Her husband, who owned his own recording studio in Michigan and helped produce two Emmy award-winning projects and one that received a Grammy nomination, now works in audio technology at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and provides audio services for productions in the theater department. In her spare time, Nan sings in the UALR community chorus.

Even outside their places of work, there's plenty of artistry of all types to satisfy the couple's lifelong passions. In fact, the city has more art galleries per capita than any city she's ever lived in, excluding Rome, Italy, and she's lived in cities in Michigan, Ohio and Massachusetts. "Little Rock is an arts town," she said, and as the Arkansas Arts Center's executive director, she hopes to define it as such in more people's minds. She challenges skeptics to visit the center, go to the Arkansas Reparatory Theater and listen to the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. "If you ever had any preconceived notions about what life would be like in a mid-sized Southern city, they will be gone."

Of course, many people are already familiar with the state's dazzling arts scene, and the Arkansas Arts Center in particular. In a normal year, 290,000 people visit the center, extraordinary for a museum in a city the size of Little Rock. That's more than the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City receives. And with a new visiting exhibit, the center's numbers could grow.

From September 25, 2009 to July 5, 2010, the center will host "World of the Pharaohs: Treasures of Egypt Revealed," the first Egyptian art exhibition ever to come to the state and one of the center's most ambitious to date. Consisting of more than 200 objects from the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the best collections of Egyptian art in North America, the exhibition paints an overview of 3,000 years of Egyptian life. Excavated in Cairo in the early 20th century in collaboration with Harvard and the Egyptian government, the objects – including a colossus of Ramses the Great, Egyptian art, jewelry, statues, sculptures and funerary artifacts –tell the story of both Egyptian life and death.

Nan's excitement about the exhibition, which even includes two mummies, is obvious. Seeing it will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many people, she says. Little Rock is one of only four North American cities the exhibit will stop at before returning to Boston, meaning numerous visitors will come from out of state for the chance to see it.

Spectacular as the exhibition will be, it's not what makes the center special, Nan says. Instead, it's the center's intimacy. It's the fact that visitors can take in a van Gogh or Cézanne painting up close, without disruption. Residents of other cities should be so lucky to get as closely acquainted with the pieces in their hometown art museums. To Nan, the atmosphere fits perfectly with the young Arkansas Arts Center's extensive and renowned collection of drawings.

"Drawings and works of craft are fairly intimate kinds of works of art," she says. "They're meant to be looked at, and while we can't let people actually handle them, they're meant to be sort of mentally handled, really examined closely and enjoyed slowly and personally, and it's a little harder to do in a great big cavernous museum with thousands of people streaming by you or pushing up behind you."

That style and environment is perfect for art, and as someone whose life revolves around art, perhaps it's for similar reasons that Arkansas has been perfect for Nan Plummer. What greater work of art is there than a human being? In a state with a smaller population, neighbors and even strangers can take the time to talk with and get to know each other, to explore new realms of one another's intricacies even during a random conversation on the sidewalk and to become so familiar with all the people around them that they truly feel at home.