Art in the American Outback: News Roundup

THE NORTHEAST

The Music According to Lafayette Gilchrist
"When Lafayette Gilchrist celebrated the release of his 2005 album Towards the Shining Path at Highlandtown's Creative Alliance at the Patterson, he wore his gray Kangol hat with the gold piping at a jaunty tilt and stomped on the keyboard pedals with his basketball shoes. He would not have looked out of place in a Run-D.M.C. video, and the rhythms of his compositions hinted at the hours he spent watching hip-hop videos as a teenager in Prince George's County. But as Gilchrist's big hands massaged the keys of his Kurzweil PC88, the Bolton Hill resident did things to those funk and hip-hop beats that had never been heard on MTV..."
(Thanks to Geoffrey Himes of Baltimore City Paper)

Cultural leaders want property tax revenue set aside for the arts
"Cheered on by their allies in government, cultural leaders tried in the late 1980s to snare a fraction of Erie County sales tax revenue as a permanent hedge against budget uncertainty -- their own and the county's. They asked that one-eighth of the "temporary" eighth penny per dollar that had been added to the sales tax to bail the county out of fiscal hot water in 1984, and subsequently extended by the Legislature, be dedicated to the arts. The effort ultimately failed...
Almost 20 years later, the cultural community is gearing up to try again."
(Thanks to Tom Buckham of The Buffalo News)

THE SOUTH

San Antonio Video Art Screens in Barcelona
Michael Stoltz's animation, courtesy of YouTube.
(Thanks to Leslie Raymond of the San Antonio Current)

Great Halls of Fire
The San Antonio Museum of Art has ripped out the nasty carpet, created more wall space, and put a bright coat of paint in the Contemporary Galleries.
(Thanks to Diana Lyn Roberts of the San Antonio Current)

'Portraits' of History
More than 2,000 portraits of returning survivors, relief workers, and rebuilders recently became this self-published, glossy, hardcover oral history coffee-table book.
Thanks to Michael Patrick Welch of the Gambit Weekly of New Orleans)

Telling It Straight: "Twice Told Tombigbee Tales"
Mills devotes chapters to the "Three Kings of Tombigbee Country" (Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus), former legislators Butch Lambert and Jerry Wilburn, former state Supreme Court Justice Armis Hawkins and Mill's life as a young legislator staying at the old Sun-N-Sand Motel.
Thanks to Jere Nash of the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press)