Gallery 221 has expanded beyond its ground-floor quarters in the Pyramid Place building at 221 W. Second St. and now encompasses all of the second floor.
Yet the expansion transcends the meaning of gallery, says manager Jenn Freeman.
“We want to be an art community, not just an art gallery,” Freeman said.
There are three other display rooms, as well as 15 rooms offered at $12 a square foot for artists to ply their skills, said Amanda Judd, who manages Pyramid Place.Eight are currently rented, she said.
Freeman represents collectors and artists, the “buy and sell” sides in the business of art. “We also broker from one collector to anoth-er,” said Freeman, a native of Little Rock. She attended the University of California at San Diego and concentrated on studio art.
But the center of this community is the Gino Hollander gallery and “studio.”
Hollander was a member of the famed abstract expressionist school in New York in the 1950s, along with Jackson Pollock and others. Hollander’s painting technique caught the eye of Norman Rockwell, whose nostalgic pictures are far from Hollander’s style. Nevertheless, Rockwell persuaded Hollander to show him how to execute that technique, Freeman said.
Freeman went to Ojai, Calif., last year and visited Hollander, now 89 and in failing health.
She returned and built on the second floor a formal gallery and a replica of his California studio. His canvases are stapled to the walls in the studio, just as in his California workplace. They include his “universe series,” whose inspiration was his near-death experience, when a blow from a tennis racket triggered severe heart problems.
Top price is one of that series, a 71-inch-by-96-inch, black-and-white painting priced at $64,750.
Freeman says she has sold more than 50 of his works since she became his exclusive dealer in Arkansas.
The art world in Arkansas also has benefited from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, the world-class showplace built by Alice Walton.
“Crystal Bridges is bringing a lot of interest in art,” Freeman said.
Last year, a group from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington came to Arkansas to see the Bentonville museum.
On their way, members of the group made two other art stops in the state, Freeman said - the Arkansas Arts Center and Gallery 221.
Aside from getting the good exposure, Gallery 221 made several sales to the travelers, she said.
Soul of the South Television has bought the 30,000-square-foot former headquarters of Equity Broadcasting Co. at 1 Shackleford Drive.
That will enable the network to establish a newsroom, which means the company can make its case to the Federal Communications Commission for carriers, cable or satellite, to sign an agreement as a “must-carry” organization, said Carl McCaskill, chief of communications for the network. Must-carry regulations ensure that cable subscribers get local TV broadcasts by requiring cable/satellite companies to carry them.
Thus the success of the network will ride on that, McCaskill said. Soul of the South - which says it will carry “a broad lineup of Southern themed programming emphasizing the lifestyles and culture of African-American Southerners”- has heretofore relied on news feeds from the field, such as the trial last year in Florida of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, McCaskill said.
The network is carried by KKYK in Little Rock and KMYA in Camden and more than a dozen other markets, including large ones such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, and others such as Monroe, La., and Jackson, Miss.
Soul of the South was founded last year by Larry Morton, former chief executive of Equity and founder of Retro TV, and former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Richard Mays.
It has received a $1.5 million loan from Arkansas Capital Corporation and $500,000 from the Governor’s Quick Action Closing fund, according to a release.
The proposed sale of Mercy Hospital Hot Springs to Catholic Health Initiatives is moving forward as the parties discuss the transfer of ownership, according to Barb Meyer, communications director for Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy Health.
The parties announced in October that they had signed a nonbinding letter of intent.
“We’re expecting to finalize the sale in the first quarter,” Meyer said last week.
The sale would be the solution to the failed attempt by Mercy Health to sell the 309-bed hospital to Tennessee based Capella Healthcare, a publicly traded company which owns the 166-bed National Park Medical Center in Hot Springs.
Bishop Anthony Taylor of the Little Rock Diocese objected to the sale to Capella on the grounds that it would not agree to not perform elective abortions beyond an initial five-year period and might not adhere to Mercy Hot Springs’ historical commitment to serving the poor.
Taylor and a representative for Mercy Health paid visits to the Vatican. The Federal Trade Commission warned that it would oppose the deal because it stood to hurt competition.
If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or email him at jweatherly@arkansasonline.com
Business, Pages 61 on 01/12/2014