Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992 TAG: 9201240280
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jeff DeBell
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SCULPTORS FIND A FRIEND AT THE HOSPITAL
Lewis-Gale Hospital will display the work of area sculptors on its grounds for a six-month period and pay the artists for the use of their pieces.The project should be taken as heartening for the arts in general, coming at a time when economic hardship has forced a sharp decline in most corporate support.
"That's one reason I wanted to step forward," said Lewis-Gale president Karl Miller, a strong believer in the mutual benefits of marriage between art and commerce. "I think the future of art is in business."
The hospital project will give the artists exposure and a small honorarium. It will provide what Miller calls a "heightened awareness of business involvement in and support of the arts."
Finally, he said, it will help to "de-hospitalize hospitals," making them be seen as "more of a therapeutic milieu and not just a place where people go for X-rays and cardiac caths."
"A hospital belongs to the community and the community needs to be represented in the hospital," Miller said.
The sculptors who have been asked to submit work are Linda Atkinson, Steve Bickley, Charles Brouwer, R.G. Brown, Mimi Babe Harris, Jim Hudson and Adam Cohen. The art will be displayed on the hospital's outside grounds, starting sometime in the spring.
The project is being coordinated by The Arts Council of the Blue Ridge, with help from Ruth Appelhof and Mark Scala of the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts.
Roanoke Symphony officials are not exactly wringing their hands over the mishap that has left the orchestra shell inoperable at the Roanoke Civic Center auditorium.
They see it as an opportunity to replace the shell, with which they have long been dissatisfied. Orchestra executive director Margarite Fourcroy calls it an "acoustical disaster."
The shell was damaged recently when pulleys came loose while lifting it off the stage for storage.
At the urging of Fourcroy and conductor Victoria Bond, the orchestra board has formally recommended that the civic center retain ARTEC Consultants, Inc. of New York, acoustics experts, when repairing or replacing the shell.
"I cannot overemphasize the importance of doing this right," Bond said.
"The Flowers of William Shakespeare," a print series by Moneta artist/calligrapher Susan Loy, has been added to the art collection of the prestigious Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
Each of the four prints in the series combines a seasonal flower bouquet with appropriate quotations from the plays or poetry of Shakespeare. The prints were made from watercolors over a four-year period starting in 1988.
The Acting Company of Roanoke Valley, perennially in need of a home but never giving up, will do its next show at Groucho's in downtown Roanoke.
The company will use a banquet room over the restaurant and next to the Roanoke Comedy Club.
The truly dedicated night-outer could make a real evening of it without ever leaving the building: dinner at Groucho's, followed by the play, followed by the late Comedy Club show, followed by a nightcap back downstairs at the bar.
The play, incidentally, is "The Cocktail Hour," by A.R. Gurney. It's a comedy, but Acting Company president Tricia Givens said, "it has a lot of depth and not just surface ha-has."
The play will open at Groucho's on March 20.
New York native Ken Sheck is the new general manager of Lime Kiln Arts Inc. He succeeds Caro Hall, who is moving to Philadelphia after four years with the outdoor theater in Lexington.
Sheck worked at the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk last year and, before that, spent five years with StageWest in Springfield, Mass. He has a degree in English from Westfield State College in Massachusetts.