UP AND COMING

Arts Center works at event in the off year

Throwing the right fundraising party is not unlike skydiving with your parachute in parts in a basket. You sign on to the party and all the elements are there, ready to go, so you leap. Your only job is to piece them together, and the end -- the party -- is a long ways down. You pull stuff out of the basket and they catch in the wind, and down below, the enormousness of the whole thing comes closer, closer.

Often, OK, usually, it all works out. Sometimes you get so good at it it's no longer a rush. (I've been to those parties. They feel like church.) But sometimes, sometimes, the chute's the wrong size or you land in a volcano, and then, what a mess.

Something like that happened at the Arkansas Arts Center's last off-year event, Studio Party: Jazzkapelle, in 2012. (Off-year, as in not Tabriz, which is every odd-numbered year and usually raises about $800,000.) This Todd Bagwell-designed party was inspired by a '20s-era Max Beckmann piece of the same name with the band Liquid Pleasure and something called "Cherry Wine Slurp" served in neon test tubes. Food was late in coming. People got drunk pretty quickly.

This party was designed with a younger crowd in mind, but it drew a lot of the stalwarts, like the Bradburys and the Hursts and the Thomas and the Sotomoras, and it didn't gel.

"We didn't quite find the right mix," Bagwell told me some time ago. "But ticket sales did hit its goal ... and the goal was to bring young people into the arts center."

Enter the Beaux Arts Ball.

On Saturday, in honor of the centennial of the Fine Arts Club of Arkansas, club matrons are bringing back a black-tie-optional ball, which was actually the predecessor of Tabriz and hasn't gone off since the early '70s.

There'll be ballroom dancing to the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's big band, a three-foot cake donated by Tracy Cakes, champagne from Moon Distributors. Bagwell imagines some partygoers will meet at each other's homes for dinner and arrive at the party in small groups, like dances of yore (or prom). He imagined a ballroom dance class to prepare people, and that class took place a couple of weeks ago.

One of the original balls saw Dave Brubeck come in and perform, so ball chairman Annamary Thompson made the effort to sign a marquee act this time and landed Broadway crooner and recording artist Sal Viviano.

"It's huge," she says.

So if Studio Party was meant to entice young people but not scare off stalwarts, Beaux Arts Ball is clearly nostalgic for an earlier age, but one that will feel, hopefully, "retro" for a certain millennial set.

"I would tell you that I don't think the arts center has hit on just the right thing yet to do every year, for the off-year event, and that's something strategically we're looking at," said Kelly Ford, the AAC's director of development.

Bagwell once told me one of the greatest assets a nonprofit can bring to a fundraiser is space for the party. "Many nonprofits feel very strongly about entertaining their donors 'on campus' as there is unlimited value in hosting the event in the spaces it benefits financially."

(If you want a date, take him or her out to dinner. If you want a mate, invite him or her to dinner at your place.)

"We've spent hours, weeks, really, debating what this party should be," Ford said, "how it should look and feel, who was our audience -- in the end, for this particular party, we're honoring 100 years of this organization. It has to have something about it that feels nostalgic and that demographic will want to attend."

Meet one who's sure to. Eighty-eight-year-old Jean Hamilton has attended every Beaux Arts Ball since the first one in '58. She credits it with reanimating the club and getting the Arkansas Arts Center built about five years later.

"The Fine Arts Club was dead wood. It was dead wood. When all this started happening, I mean, we moved out of the Dark Ages."

Hamilton co-chaired the 1963 event that corresponded with the dedication of the arts center we know today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lent the center hundreds of pieces from its collection -- 17th-century baroque, Chinese black Hawthorn porcelains, 18th-century rococo, among others -- "and Little Rock, Arkansas, the mid-South had never seen anything like it," Hamilton said.

"That was a real bash. The director of the Met -- I got him to sit at my table. You just do not get the director of the Met to sit with you for dinner every day."

But eventually, Hamilton remembers, the ball "had gotten a little out of tune with the times," and that prompted the switch to Tabriz, which is now in its fifth decade.

"Those early days were unique," Hamilton told me, because Little Rock was "a lovely, lovely place, but it was provincial."

In 1958, the Beaux Arts Ball, and five years later the arts center itself, marked miles on the road to a more cosmopolitan city. They were change agents, and we need them still.

Bagwell isn't giving up on a more modern, youthful event. When he talked to me, he said, three or four times, Beaux Arts Ball is not replacing Studio Party.

I hope so, because as an observer of this scene, there's so much more frisson in a fledgling event than one now in its fifth, or 15th, or 25th incarnation. Especially one that employs the vision and touch of an event planner. Yet, there's a reason the biggest galas are conservative, longstanding affairs -- these things aren't just about smiles and piles of cash. If they were, some charity by now would have staged a Puppy Bowl at the Wally Allen Ballroom.

They're promotional. They're self-promotional. The goal is always: win new converts to the cause.

That doesn't happen if the mission gets eclipsed by a good time.

High Profile on 06/01/2014

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