MARY PICKFORD, "America's Sweetheart," in a portrait from
1917.
(Photo: Hartsook Studio, S.F./L.A.)
Can you name the only person ever to be voted most popular actor/actress in America for 15 of 17 years and the only woman to co-own a major Hollywood movie studio? The answer is Mary Pickford.
Sweetheart: The Films of Mary Pickford, which opened at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater on June 18, highlights the films of the most popular and beloved woman in the history of cinema. Featuring beautifully restored 35mm prints, a presentation of the Mary Pickford Foundation and Milestone Films, this series represents the first-ever theatrical retrospective celebration of the actress dubbed "America's Sweetheart."
Hugh Munro Neely, a documentary film producer, will lecture on the life and career of Mary Pickford in the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater at 7 p.m. June 25.
Neely recently completed the feature-length biography Mary Pickford: A Life on Film, which was written by Rita Mae Brown and hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. It will premiere late this year. Neely is also a musician and orchestra conductor. He has conducted orchestras in Europe and America. He is producing a re-scoring of four Mary Pickford features for release this fall by Milestone Film and Video in conjunction with the Mary Pickford Foundation.
With comedic talents equal to Keaton, Lloyd or Chaplin, and the tragic range of Gish or Swanson, Mary Pickford was the consummate movie star of her era. When other stars were just discovering their art in one- and two-reelers, Pickford was starring in five or more features a year: many of them among the finest treasures of cinema.
Mary Pickford (1892-1972) was the first actress to achieve international super stardom. She was celebrated around the world for her remarkable acting ability, her string of hit films, and her pioneering behind-the-scenes achievements as one of the founders of United Artists and as the first actress to produce her own films. Pickford's fairy-tale marriage to action star Douglas Fairbanks made the pair Hollywood's first royal couple. And, as such, they presided as hosts to movie industry stars and moguls, presidents and real royalty at their legendary home, Pickfair. Mary worked with the finest artists and craftsmen in Hollywood. She also played star-maker countless times, including casting the very young Zazu Pitts in A Little Princess and hand-picking a little-known actor as her leading man in her final film, Secrets. His name was Leslie Howard.
The peak of her popularity lasted more than 20 years, during which she was voted the "Number One Actress of the Year" by Photoplay 15 times. Thousands of fans turned out whenever she made a public appearance. Even in the Soviet Union - despite a total news blackout ordered by the Hollywood-hating Stalin - word of Pickford's arrival in Moscow spread like wildfire and brought the city to a total standstill. In Stella Maris and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Pickford was also one of the first actresses to appear in dual roles - demonstrating her brilliant emotional range. Unlike many of her peers, Pickford made an easy transition from silent to sound films, winning the first Academy Award for an actress in a talkie for Coquette in 1929.
Yet for decades most of Pickford's films have been out of circulation and her charm and feisty humor have been appreciated by reputation only. Sweetheart: The Films of Mary Pickford brings Pickford's films out of the archives and back to the silver screen. Many of these films have not been shown theatrically since their initial presentations 70 to 80 years ago. Included in this retrospective are many of her silent classics plus rarely-seen talkies.
Sweetheart: The Films of Mary Pickford is showing June 19 through 21 and June 25 through 28. Screenings are at 1, 3, 7, and 9 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays and at 3, 5, 7, and 9 p.m. on Sundays. Complete schedules and synopses are available at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater.
Admission to each film is $6; $5 for students; and $4 for senior citizens, children, and members of the Friends of the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater. Series passes, good for all screenings, are available for $25 for general admission and $15 for senior citizens, children and members. Series passes may be purchased in advance at any Russ's Market.
Carnival is the first performance of the Nebraska Repertory Theatre's summer season. Based on Material by Helen Deutsch, Carnival features music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and book by Michael Stewart. The performance is directed by Kent Paul and stars Rachel Gottlieb, Kevin Varner and Paul Steger. Kevin Paul Hofeditz, in his final performance with the Nebraska Rep prior to moving to Dallas, appears as Marco.
Colorful roustabouts juggle, tumble and set the stage for the magic of the carnival. Lili appears, wide-eyed and lonely and enchanted with the desire to join the lively and glamorous carnival. But this troupe, touring the small cities of France, is raffish and run-down. Lili, unsuccessful at several jobs with the troupe, becomes the pawn in a fierce rivalry for her affection between Marco the Magnificent, the troupe's magician, and Paul Berthalet, a puppeteer. The hauntingly touching musical theme, "Love Makes the World Go Round," runs through the story. The effect is "America's Magical Musical" with its universal and enchanting appeal.
Carnival continues at the Howell Theatre at 8 p.m. on June 19 and 20.
Second on the schedule is The Woman in Black, a chilling ghost story by Stephen Malatratt, based on a story by Susan Hill. The director is Terence Lamude. The play stars William McCauley, Steven Shields and Karen Kumm.
The framework for this spine-tingler is theatrical and unusual; a middle-aged lawyer hires an actor to tutor him in recounting a story that has long-troubled the lawyer concerning events that transpired when he attended the funeral of an elderly recluse. There he caught sight of the woman in black, the mere mention of whom strikes terror into the hearts of the locals, for she is a spectre who haunts the neighborhood where her illegitimate child was accidentally killed.
The Woman in Black will be performed at 8 p.m. on July 8-11, 14-18 and at 3 p.m. July 12 in the Carson Theater.
An "Our Theatre for Family Audiences Production" of Aladdin, a participation play by Moses Goldberg, will be directed by Karen Libman. It stars Eric Moyer as Burgundo.
As the audience arrives they are greeted by a troupe of itinerant peddlers selling their colorful wares. Burgundo, the father of the family of peddlers, stops his sales and proclaims that what he has always wanted to do was to be an actor. The result is the creative retelling of a story that is "full of magic and faraway places" the story of Aladdin.
It will be performed at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. July 24; 2 and 7:30 p.m., July 25 and 2 p.m. July 26 in the Studio Theatre, third floor Temple Building. Admission is $3.
The season ends with Noises Off by Michael Frayn. Directed by Bob Hall, it stars Victoria Page and Christopher Cartmill.
This Broadway hit is a farce about farce that takes the cliches of the genre and shakes them inventively through a series of kaleidoscopic patterns. Never missing a trick, it has as its first act a pastiche of traditional farce; as its second, a contemporary variant on the formula; as its third, an elaborate undermining of it. The play opens with a touring company dress-rehearsing Nothing On, a hilarious melee of stock characters and situations. Characters stampede in and out of doors.
Noises Off is scheduled for 8 p.m. July 29-31, Aug. 1, 4-8 and 3 p.m. Aug. 2 in Howell Theatre.
For tickets, contact the Theatre Box Office at 472-2073.
An exhibition of work by Andy Warhol opens June 23 in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden. Warhol was well known as a painter of pop art and cultural figures, as a filmmaker, and for his statement: "In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes."
Paintings and prints including five works on loan from a private San Francisco collection, (two silkscreens on canvas,Most Wanted Men No. 12, Frank B., and three synthetic polymer silkscreen prints, Tunafish Disaster, Mao and Robert Mapplethorpe) will be displayed. Also included will be Marilyn Monroe on loan from the Hastings College Museum, and Sheldon's own Myths: Mickey Mouse, the only Warhol painting held in a public museum collection in Nebraska, and color silkscreens Cow, 1973, from the collection of Mary Riepma Ross and Vegetarian Vegetable (The Alphabet Soup), a recent gift of Carl and Jane Rohman through the University of Nebraska Foundation.
Warhol's well-known images of consumer goods - the all-too-familiar soup-cans were his first successful works; his preference for portraits of famous people such as Marilyn Monroe (Warhol's Orange Marilyn was auctioned recently by Sotheby's for $17.3 million), and Mao Tse-tung, chairman of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and of its Communist Party from 1949 to 1976, are both images of pop culture icons that he created in "The Factory" as his studio was called; his preoccupation with newspaper clips about death and environmental disasters as evident in Tunafish Disaster; and his series depicting criminals from police mug shots was produced for those with a more "concerned" view of the world.
Warhol's work manifests repetitions of the familiar, as stated: "I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again."
The intent of this intimate look at Warhol's role as a cult figure and perhaps the most enigmatic artist in late 20th-century American art is anything but boring. Where else can visitors mingle with Mao, Marilyn, Mickey, Mapplethorpe and Most Wanted Men in addition to Jackie Kennedy?
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden has acquired two masterworks of American modernism.
In December, the Sheldon Gallery received Untitled (Abstraction), c. 1930 by Augustus Vincent Tack as a donation from Carl and Jane Rohman of Lincoln.
In November, the gallery purchased at auction in November Untitled, c. 1946, an important early pivotal painting by the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still. It was put on view in the permanent collection installation in February. Both paintings add considerably to the breadth and depth of the gallery's comprehensive collection of 20th-century American art.
Untitled (Abstraction) is a masterwork of Tack's mature style, a style which, although abstract, alludes to the landscape that had interested Tack throughout his formative years. It is this spiritual aspect of Tack's painting and his desire to develop a suitable formal vocabulary through which it could be expressed that makes Tack's art "modern."
Tack's importance for the development of American modernism is evidenced by Still's Untitled, 1946. Regarded recently by many art historians as one of the most important of the abstract expressionists, Still, as did Tack, understood the powerful symbolic and liberating potential of abstraction.
Still started out painting in a figurative manner influenced by the symbolic forms of Surrealism. By the late1940s, however, Still's work became almost completely abstract and expressionistic, as he covered his unprimed canvases with ragged-edged flamelike forms in heavy impasto, which gave the paintings a physical presence. Still's raw and expansive canvases have suggested to many critics a feeling of America.
The acquisitions of major paintings by Tack and Still, artists who had not previously been represented in the permanent collection, reiterate the Sheldon Gallery's commitment to providing a comprehensive view of the history and development of 20th-century American art, a history and development in which both Tack and Still have played important parts. Still's Untitled is currently on view in the gallery's permanent collection. Tack's Untitled (Abstraction) is included in the Sheldon Gallery's current statewide touring exhibition, "The Art of Abstraction."
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden is presenting a special temporary display "Color and Movement" in Sheldon's Great Hall. The presentation of these kinetic works is planned in connection with this summer's visiting audience as well as to complement Sheldon's schedule of activities such as each Tuesday evening's "Jazz in June" concerts in the sculpture garden, and the annual Family Day scheduled for June 28 both of which are sponsored by the Nebraska Art Association.
Calder's Red Disk, Black Lace in Sheldon's Great Hall provides the focal point around which additional colorful or kinetic, whimsical sculptures are currently installed. As the inventor of the mobile, Calder is internationally renowned for the development of a new idiom in modem art - suspended moving sculpture.
Included in "Color and Movement" are David Bottini's Desert Light, Mark di Suvero's Untitled two-part stainless steel and steel mobile, Tom Holland's epoxy on aluminum painting Zeno, George Rickey's Six Lines in a Column, Anthony Padovano's Taxi 1, and Charles Maddox's Rotating Pentagon with Vibrating Rods.
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden is presenting Collectors' Graphics: The Sherman Collection, a selection of 35 lithographs produced under the auspices of the Collectors' Graphics workshop in Bridghampton, N.Y., and donated to the Sheldon Gallery by Michael and Kim Sherman in August 1997.
Founded by commercial printer Jules Sherman in 1959, the Collectors' Graphics workshop was intended as a creative and aesthetic outlet for artists who would, on evenings and weekends, utilize the commercial printing equipment. Although it continued only through 1962, many artists expanded their technical horizons and tested their creative capacities by experimenting with the challenging process of lithography. Through the influence of the painter Reginald Pollack, whose brother Lou ran the influential Periodot Gallery in New York, numerous artists passed through the workshop, many of whom subsequently achieved national and international reputations and are already represented in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Gallery.
The exhibition continues until Aug. 30.
The Space Between is the title of a handwoven textile environment and dance about grief and healing of the same name. Both works will be featured at 7:30 p.m. June 25 and 26 at the Wagon Train Project performing loft, 512 S. Seventh St., as the concluding event of the second annual Lin/Oma performance festival. Wendy Weiss, University of Nebraska textiles, clothing and design professor, created the artwork and Joan Stone, University of Kansas dance director, choreographed the dance.
Experimental music by Jay Kreimer and Jerry Johnston will accompany the performance. Dancers from Lincoln, including several university faculty and students, will perform group works choreographed by Joan Stone on the same theme. Following the Friday night dance program, Big Chef Zydeco (Jay Kreimer, Jerry Johnston, Sten Eisentrager and Dave Novak) will take the stage offering a program of lively dance music. Ticket are $10 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students.
Mennonite quilts from the International Quilt Study Center's James Collection will be on exhibit through July 30 in the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery. Sunshine and Shadow: 19th Century Mennonite Quilts features 14 quilts, the majority made in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Examples of turn-of-the-century Mennonite women's dress, as well as a selection of period photographs from Mennonite Women of Lancaster County: A Story in Photographs from 1855-1935 by Joanne Siegrist (a tenth generation Pennsylvania Mennonite) provide additional insights into Mennonite life.
Mennonite quilts are exhibited less frequently than Amish quilts and this exhibit provides an opportunity to view the finest examples of Mennonite quilts from the James Collection.
The exhibition research, design and text development were conducted by Michelle Harm, a curatorial intern and graduate student in the University of Nebraska's Museum Studies Program, in consultation with Patricia Crews, professor of Textiles, Clothing and Design and director of the Quilt Study Center.
The gallery, located on East Campus on the second floor of the Home Economics Building, is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at no charge.
There will be a special Ghosting (telling of ghost stories) immediately following the last Jazz in June at approximately 9 p.m. June 30. The Ghosting will introduce everyone to the upcoming Tuesday Tales storytelling series to begin in July. Storytelling artists for the evening will be Lucy Duncan (one of the Five Bright Chicks), Karen Libman and Matt Jones. In case of inclement weather the ghosting will be in the Sheldon Gallery Auditorium.
The new storytelling series for the whole family will occur on Tuesday evenings at 7 p.m. on July 7, 14, 21 and 28. All storytellings are free and open to the public.
Storytellers include Libman, Jones, Bill Thomas and the Five Bright Chicks. All will occur on the Architecture Hall steps. In case of inclement weather, Tuesday Tales move inside the Westbrook Music Building.
Tuesday Tales is sponsored by the UNL Summer Sessions program and Arts Are Basic. Contact Beth Schenker at 472-9348 for more information.
A free concert featuring Jazz and Blues singer Annette Murrell is scheduled for 7 p.m. Aug. 4 at the Culture Center. There will be limited seating. The concert is sponsored by the Summer Sessions program and Arts Are Basic.
Contact Beth Schenker at 472-9348 for more information.
The University of Nebraska campus will be the site of two Pow-Wows this summer. The first will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. July 16 on the Memorial Mall (north of Morrill Hall at 14th and Vine).
The second Pow-Wow will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. July 17 on east campus on the grassy area between the back of the Ice Cream Store and the East Union.
The Pow-Wows are sponsored by the University of Nebraska Summer Sessions program, Arts are Basic, UPC and the Nebraska Arts Council.
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