ARTS

Seven selected for Austin Arts Hall of Fame

Artists, a theater founder, a musician, a philanthropist and two dance leaders to be celebrated.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, May 22, 2009

As artists, patrons, administrators — or often assuming multiple roles — the seven people named this year to the Austin Arts Hall of Fame have made significant and sustained contributions to Austin?s cultural life, dedicating themselves to keeping Austin artistic and individualistic. Next week, at a free public ceremony, the seven will be honored at the Austin Critics? Table Awards, the annual awards ceremony hosted by an informal group of local arts critics from the American-Statesman and the Austin Chronicle.

Damian Priour, artist

It's rare that an artist remains as dedicated to a specific place and landscape as sculptor Damain Priour.

A fifth-generation Texan, Priour has had a lifelong love for Texas fossil-laced limestone and green-blue glass — materials that speak of his deep affection for the Texas Gulf Coast landscape of his youth.

His large-scale abstract sculptures — both towering and delicate — have been commissioned for public and private art collections in Corpus Christi, Dallas, Tucson, Chicago and Los Angeles, among other cities, spreading bits of Texas Gulf Coast wherever they go. In Austin, Priour's monumental works adorn the Austin Convention Center, the Austin Public Library and the grounds of Laguna Gloria, the Austin Museum of Art's historic location in West Austin. In 2008, he was named Texas State Artist. In June, the Galveston Arts Center will open a 30-year retrospective of Priour's work.

An advocate for such organizations as the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum and the Austin Museum of Art, Priour engaged a much wider community of his artistic peers recently when he launched his Texas Chair Project, making 100 small limestone and glass chairs that he sent, unannounced, to 100 Texas artists he admired, inviting them to make a small chair of their own design. Together, the collection of Texas-made chairs went on exhibit at AMOA. As an extension of the project, Priour launched www.theglobalchairproject.net, with artists donating miniature chairs to sell online with proceeds going to a foundation to benefit art and environmental causes.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Mary Margaret Farabee, philanthropist

For some Austinites, Mary Margaret Farabee defines enlightened philanthropy. Not only has she helped scores of arts and service nonprofits by staging fundraisers and chairing volunteer committees, she has done the hard work of training the next generation of do-gooders. She received a bachelor of arts degree in the Plan II honors program from the University of Texas in 1961 and a master's degree in American history in 1968.

Wife of former state Sen. Ray Farabee, she is best known as the founding chairwoman of the Texas Book Festival, which she led for eight years. Free to the public, the festival has showcased more than 150 authors and has attracted more than 50,000 book lovers. Additionally, the festival has raised more than $2 million for 550 Texas public libraries. Prior to that, she toiled in the fields of business development and public relations, serving, for instance, as KLRU-TV's vice president of development from 1986 to 1991. She lent her considerable persuasive skills and brilliant smile to projects, such as renovating the Paramount Theatre, establishing the Philosopher's Rock and organizing the Charles W. Moore Foundation around the Center for the Study of Place.

Among her other longtime associations are the Heritage Society of Austin, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, UT Ransom Center, KUT, People's Community Clinic, Witliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos and the Molly National Investigative Journalism Prize. Farabee's the one philanthropist organizers want in their corner, because where she goes, legions of admirers follow.

— Michael Barnes

Sylvia Orozco, co-founder, Mexic-Arte Museum

It started as a dream for a handful of Mexican American artists — including Sylvia Orozco — who didn't feel that they had a cultural home in Texas' capital city.

Now, 25 years later, Mexic-Arte Museum thrives as a Congress Avenue arts destination and nexus for Mexican and Mexican American art. And Orozco thrives as its director.

Orozco, along with artists Pio Pulido and Sam Coronado — who founded Coronado Studios and was inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame in 2005 — founded Mexic-Arte in 1984. Its first home? A 300-square-foot studio inside a now-gone downtown building known as the Arts Warehouse, the American-Statesman's former warehouse on San Antonio and Third streets. From that tiny space, the trio spun ambitious exhibitions and also launched Austin's first Día de los Muertos parade.

By 1988, with downtown Austin hardly the destination it is today, the venture moved to its current location at 419 Congress Ave. In her tenure as director, Orozco has forged exhibit exchange relationships with Mexican art institutions including the Diego River Studio Museum, presented exhibits that feature work of four centuries of Mexican and Latino art and also started a permanent collection that is being celebrated now in a sweeping exhibit.

A native of Cuero, Orozco graduated from the University of Texas in the late '70s. After college, she traveled to Mexico City to hone her skills as a painter at the San Carlos Academy, the oldest arts school in the Americas, and also study the master Mexican muralists. But perhaps her greatest work of art is Mexic-Arte itself.

"The Mexican and Mexican American influence has been in this country since its formation, and today it is an integral fiber in our nation's fabric," she has said.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Eugene Slavin and Alexandra Nadal, dance leaders

It takes a long line of leaders to nurture an arts company beyond its 50th birthday.

Ballet Austin, founded in 1956 as the Austin Ballet Society, has been blessed with thoughtful leadership throughout its history. Among its leading lights were Eugene Slavin and Alexandra Nadal, who incorporated the company and raised its professional status, hiring 14 dancers in 1982. They brought in top guests, such as Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In the grand ballet tradition, Slavin and Nadal learned directly from masters who learned directly from the greats of dance's classical era. Born in Buenos Aires, Slavin trained at the Teatro Colón, then worked in New York under Anatole Vilzak, who succeeded Vaslav Nijinsky at the Maryinsky Theatre. He made his American debut at Carnegie Hall and joined the famed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where he partnered the legendary Maria Tallchief. He began his choreography career with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Nadal was born in the West Indies and studied in Chicago with Russia's Andre Commiacoff and former Sadler's Wells Ballet soloists Richard Ellis and Christine DuBoulay. In New York she continued her studies with Maria Swoboda and Leon Danielian (who later taught at the University of Texas). At 17, she joined Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's American tour. She danced for greats such as Agnes de Mille, Leonide Massine and Eliot Feld.

Since the 1980s, the couple has run the Slavin Nadal School of Ballet in North Austin, extending the classical tradition through successive Central Texas generations.

— Michael Barnes

Bonnie Cullum, founder, Vortex Repertory Company

Bonnie Cullum has remained remarkably true to her artistic vision, first revealed to Austin audiences more than 20 years ago.

She snatched the public's imagination during her University of Texas graduate-school years in the 1980s, when her ritual-based directing and playful, speculative performances borrowed liberally from world theater and religions. In co-founding Vortex Repertory Company in 1988, however, Cullum expanded her reach to include commissioning new works and nurturing up-and-coming performance groups. The company's first full-time home, a former movie theater multiplex on Ben White Boulevard, became a hothouse for provocative, sometimes sexually bold performances.

Later, she purchased and renovated a large shed on Manor Road that became an ignition point for East Austin's warehouse-theater revolution. She has directed more than 60 world-premiere productions and dozens of published works. She founded the Summer Youth Theatre program in 1991 to provide artistic training for young Austinites. She came by her creativity through family as well as educational means – her father is jazz great Jim Cullum, her mother, Susan Estelle Kelso, a professor of theater. She is married to composer and artist Chad Salvata, a frequent collaborator on Cullum's signature "cybernetic operas." Cullum adds that she is "an initiated witch and teacher in the Reclaiming Tradition."

— Michael Barnes

Daniel Johnson, founder, Texas Early Music Project

Before the days of sweeping romantic symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms, there was the early music of the Baroque period and Renaissance. Rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s by the same bohemians and beatniks who were resurrecting interest in traditional folk music, early music found its niche with an audience interested in its personal, direct and open qualities.

A native of Big Spring, Johnson landed in Austin in 1980 after studying at Texas Tech, where he lived in a Lubbock rental house that had just been vacated by singer-songwriters Butch Hancock and Joe Ely.

After gigging professionally with an Austin-based early music group, in 1986 Johnson took on the directorship of UT's New Music Ensemble, one of the largest and most active in the U.S., and held the job for 17 years. It was during his tenure at UT that Johnson got the notion of forming a community-based early music group — Texas Early Music Project — as an effort to bridge the gap between town and gown and offer opportunities to musicians from both inside the academy and those outside it.

Interest soon grew, and Johnson found himself directing performances that sometime featured as many as 100 musicians. Now, TEMP has a loyal following for its five-concert seasons.

Winner of Early Music America's Thomas Binkley Award honoring university ensemble directors, Johnson has performed around the globe, recorded with various groups and currently serves on the faculty of the Amherst Early Music Festival and the Texas Early Music Festival.

"The delicious thing about Austin is there's a wide range of curious people," Johnson says.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699