Tours offer peek inside Arkansas artists' lives

Little Rock hosts open up work spaces, studios for a day

Artist Matt McLeod works on a painting Saturday at the Matt McLeod Fine Art Gallery in Little Rock as visitors (background, from left) Bryan Kellar and Carol and Gayle Corley watch during the Open Studios event.
Artist Matt McLeod works on a painting Saturday at the Matt McLeod Fine Art Gallery in Little Rock as visitors (background, from left) Bryan Kellar and Carol and Gayle Corley watch during the Open Studios event.

In Jennifer Perren's apartment near the southside Main Street district in Little Rock, early afternoon light filters in through the windows onto the pale green walls and the paintings and pencil drawings hanging there.

It's both her home and her work space when she isn't at her job at a library. She displays her recent comic strip project and works on ceramics at her "cubbyhole," the space between her corner bookshelf and the desk held up by file cabinets full of the prints she made in college.

More prints are stacked in wire holders on the floor, where visitors looked through them Saturday.

"I was a little nervous because I don't host people a lot, but I thought if there were other artists doing it I wouldn't be alone," Perren said of participating in Little Rock's first Open Studios event, where artists opened their studio spaces to the public.

Twenty artists opened their work or living spaces for the event, providing free tours and the opportunity to buy their art, from prints to sculptures to pottery. Several more displayed their art at the West Central Community Center, and the Arkansas Arts Center, the Arkansas Repertory Theatre Education Annex and the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center were open as well.

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Little Rock Arts and Culture Commission member Eliza Borne said the commission had wanted to do something this year that would draw people in from the street and pique their interest in the local arts scene.

Commission member Chuck Cliett said the idea for Open Studios came from another member, Allyson Pittman Gattin, who had put on a similar event while working for the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

"There's several cities around the country that have an open-studios program," Borne said.

The event encompassed studios downtown as well as apartments and homes near southside Main Street and in west Little Rock.

"We wanted to do a project that would touch a lot of different neighborhoods in the city," Borne said.

Daniella Napolitano, who visited some of the studios Saturday, said she knew some of the artists participating, including Perren and ceramic artist Adrian Quintanar, who opened up his backyard pottery studio.

"It's good to get out and actually see people and see what people are up to, just like to actually get to see artists at work," Napolitano said. "I knew Adrian, I knew he had a studio here, but I've never actually been inside his studio."

In his own studio on Sixth Street, Matt McLeod worked on a painting of northern Arkansas' Buffalo River in vibrant orange brushstrokes while someone played a rainbow-striped piano on the sidewalk outside. His gallery displays mainly landscape paintings and sculptures by Arkansas artists in a bright space across the street from the koi mural he painted on the side of a downtown building in 2015.

McLeod said he enjoyed opening up the gallery to the public.

"I saw it as a neat idea, and I'm glad that they're doing it, and I just wanted to participate," he said. "I like anything that's gonna improve the art scene in Little Rock."

McLeod said he hopes to see more growth in the arts scene in the area around his gallery.

"Any of the places that make it in the larger cities, there's a good support for the arts," he said. "So if we really keep that in mind, it becomes a more fun place to live."

Metro on 06/11/2017

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Artist Jennifer Perren works Saturday in her Little Rock apartment during the Little Rock Arts and Culture Commission’s first Open Studios event.

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