July 11, 1997
Peter Fonda to Accept Award Here July 25
Peter Fonda, who rode into American film history on a motorcycle in the
1969 American classic Easy Rider, is appearing at the 1997 Great
Plains Film Festival, a presentation of the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater
and the Nebraska Film Office.
Fonda is the recipient of this year's Mary Riepma Ross Award, a tribute
by the Great Plains Film Festival to an established film or video artist
whose roots and heritage or artistic concerns are grounded in the Great
Plains region and culture. Past Mary Riepma Ross Award winners are film
director Joan Micklin Silver and actress Sandy Dennis.
The Mary Riepma Ross Award, named in honor of the Film Theater's
principal
benefactor, pays tribute to artists from this region whose work has made
a significant contribution to the art of cinema and the culture of our
nation.
Fonda's visit is being sponsored by the Nebraska Film Office and with the
assistance of the Stuhr Museum in Grand Island.
Fonda is being bestowed with the award at the festival's awards ceremony
for the evening of July 25. The awards ceremony is being sponsored by
Bravo:
the Arts and Entertainment Network. A retrospective of his work,
including
Easy Rider and his newest highly-acclaimed film Ulee's
Gold,
is one of the highlights of the festival.
In Ulee's Gold, written and directed by Victor Nuñez, Fonda gives
the performance of his life as Ulee Jackson, a Florida beekeeper in his
mid-50s who is struggling to hold his family together.
Fonda is as accomplished a director as he is an actor. He made his
directorial
debut with The Hired Hand, the critically-lauded western in which
he also starred, and went on to direct the science fiction feature,
Idaho
Transfer, which starred Keith Carradine. He also directed and starred
in Wanda Nevada, playing a gambler who wins Brooke Shields in a
poker
game.
The son of Henry Fonda and brother of Jane Fonda, he was drawn to acting
while still a boy. His first success came playing the lead in
Harvey
as a student at the University of Omaha and he made his Broadway debut in
1961 in Blood Sweat and Stanley Poole.
Fonda began his film career playing the romantic lead in Tammy and the
Doctor and joining the ensemble cast of the W.W.II saga The
Victors.
He then began what would become a famous association with Roger Corman,
starring in Wild Angels, as the ultra-cool, iron-fisted leader of
a violent biker gang, opposite Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd.
Next, Fonda appeared in Corman's psychedelic film The Trip, again
with Dern, as well as Susan Strasberg and Dennis Hopper.
Hopper, Fonda and Corman teamed up again in the seminal
anti-establishment
film Easy Rider. Fonda produced and also received an Academy Award
nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Other film credits include Outlaw Blues, Dirty Mary, Crazy
Larry,
Nadja, Escape from L.A. and made a cameo appearance in
Bodies,
Rest & Motion, which starred his daughter Bridget Fonda.
Rep to Present Albee Classic
The Nebraska Repertory Theatre will present Edward Albee's classic play,
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" during the month of July in
the Carson Theater in the Lied Center.
The story is told during one drunken evening in the home of a professor
in a small college. He and his wife return late at night and loaded from
a Saturday night party somewhere else, she announces, amidst general
profanity,
that she has invited another couple - a new instructor and his wife - to
stop by for a nightcap. The visitors prove to be a tough and
opportunistic
younger instructor and his shatteringly naive bride. The drinks flow
faster
and darker, inhibitions melt, and it becomes obvious that the hostess is
determined to have a hack at the young visitor, and that underneath the
edgy banter which is cross-fired between both couples, there is an
undercurrent
of tragedy and despair. It becomes increasingly evident that the elder
couple's
almost inhuman bitterness toward one another - her outrageous and his
sadistic
revenge-taking - are provoked by an enormous personal sadness which they
have pledged to keep secret.
Performances are at 8 p.m. July 11-12, 15-19 and at 3 p.m. July 13. Call
the Nebraska Rep Box Office at 472-2073.
Also presented in July will be "Golliwhoppers," theatre for
family
audiences at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. July 18 and 19 in the Studio Theatre of
the Temple Building.
The next production in the Howell Theatre will be "The
Foreigner"
with performances at 8 p.m. on July 22-26, July 29 and Aug. 2 and 3 p.m.
on July 27.
'Images of Penance' on Display at the Sheldon Gallery
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden is presenting
Images
of Penance, Images of Mercy, an exhibition of over 60 santos figures
curated from the collection of the Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies
of the Colorado Springs Art Center. The exhibtion will run through Aug.
17. Images of Penance, Images of Mercy focuses on the religious
art
produced by The Brotherhood of the Sangre de Cristo, a Catholic lay
confraternity
in New Mexico which has been devoted for over a century to the
preservation
of the Hispanic Southwest's distinctive religious and cultural heritage,
including the artistic traditions on display in this exhibition.
The exhibition features over 60 santos figures produced after the
American Occupation in 1846 and reveals the important role that
hand-crafted
objects played not only in the personal and corporate practice of
Hispanic
Southwestern Catholicism, but in its success in preserving the region's
distinctive cultural heritage in general. In addition, this exhibition
also
features a selection of contemporary santos figures drawn from a
local collection as well as extensive didactic wall labels, produced by
the professional staff at the Taylor Museum, that put these aesthetically
striking objects into a broader religious, cultural and historical
context.
Sheldon Displays 'Local Color' of Area Painters
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden will present
Local
Color: Burton, Christensen, DesMarais, Miller, an exhibition
featuring
the recent work of local painters Judith Burton, Neil Christensen, John
DesMarais and Lana Miller. Although its mission consists of the
acquisition,
exhibition and interpretation of American artists on a national scale,
the
Sheldon Gallery is also committed to showing the work of local and
regional
artists as an important part of its exhibition program.
Not only does Local Color reveal the serious commitment to art of
four Lincoln-based artists, it also demonstrates the strength of the
Lincoln
arts community as a whole, by which these four painters have been
nourished
and in which they have participated actively for some time. Three of the
four artists received M.F.A. degrees from UNL. Although DesMarais is the
only artist who did not pursue studio art training at the University of
Nebraska, he has used the aesthetic resources of the Sheldon Gallery for
many years as an influence in his own development as an artist.
The unifying theme of this exhibition is each artist's unique
exploitation
of the dialectical relationship between representation and abstraction
and
how each has used it to engage and work through their own compositional
problems. However, they are far from uniform in their aesthetic pursuits.
As the critic Harold Rosenberg described the Action Painters in a 1952
essay,
"What they think in common is represented only by what they do
separately."
And it is finally how each artist encounters these problems in a highly
individualistic way that determines the contours of the exhibition.
Burton has worked-over surfaces at the same time reveal and obscure the
objects she is representing, creating tense compositions that are as
abstract
as they are representational. Christensen draws on his knowledge of the
17th-century Dutch vanitas still life tradition to create an
intensely
original contemporary interpretation of this traditional theme.
DesMarais's
realism is abstract and extremely analytical, concerning himself
primarily
with creating compositions that only "appear" representational,
but are foundationally abstract, employing highly sophisticated
mathematical
formulas and purely non-objective compositional devices to order his
canvases.
And lastly, Miller utilizes both representational imagery and abstract,
gestural imagery in the most concrete way, juxtaposing an
"object,"
such as a sphere or a block, next to a non-objective gestural
passage.
A public reception in honor of the artists will be held from 6 to 8 p.m.
July 23 in the Great Hall of the Sheldon Gallery.
Church Music Workshop Offered in August
Persons working in church music can learn practical skills and techniques
at Church Music Workshop '97 scheduled for five sites in Nebraska.
The nondenominational workshop will be held in Scottsbluff, Aug. 2;
Lincoln,
Aug. 9; Omaha, Aug. 16; Grand Island, Sept. 27 and South Sioux City, Oct.
4.
The UNL School of Music is sponsoring the workshop, and sessions are
offered
for organists and choir directors. Workshop leaders are Margot Woolard
and
Quentin Faulkner from UNL.
Tuition is $35 for one registration from a church, and $25 for each
person
when more than one person from the same church registers. For more
information,
contact either Michele Deaton, 472-6861 or Orvid Owens, 483-7237.
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