XL Cover Story

Fall Arts Preview

What once was a vision is beginning to happen across Central Texas

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Thursday, September 07, 2006

The present is already looking a little like the future.

For years, the Austin arts landscape was dotted with distant hills of possibilities. Major art museums, a civic performing arts center, record-setting crowds, a creative terrain formed by a healthy strata of arts organizations — these were what arts leaders, creators and admirers toiled to cultivate. Someday, we would look more grown-up. Someday, we'd have a vibrant, mature physical arts landscape to match the enormous creative output already here.

And in the past year, some of those long-dreamed-of possibilities grew into realities. As the traditional arts season now starts, Austin's arts terrain looks a bit like it will in the future.

The most seismic change to the landscape is, of course, the new Blanton Museum of Art building. When it opened in April, a prediction-shattering 22,000 people showed up. And since then, an average of more than 2,500 visitors have graced the galleries each week.

Now, the Blanton delivers another first: Austin's first home-grown international blockbuster exhibit, "Luca Cambiaso: 1527-1585."

OK, "Cambiaso" is not a blockbuster when compared with the super-sized shows so common in the past 20 years — mass-marketed events that unfurl sometimes hundreds of artworks by A-list popular masters. But with 60 paintings and almost 100 drawings by the often-overlooked Italian Renaissance painter, the exhibit is the first major show of the artist's work in 50 years and the first to be seen outside Italy.

Meanwhile, just downtown from the Blanton, the Austin Museum of Art is breaking its own attendance records: from 38,535 visitors in 2001 to more than 80,846 in 2005, a 209 percent increase. That's likely to continue: The museum starts the season with the compelling and popular quilt artistry of the women of tiny Gee's Bend, Ala., and then hands the Live Music Capital of the World an edgy retrospective of the punk-influenced New York art world of the 1970s and 1980s.

Perhaps even more important, this fall Austin Museum of Art will unveil plans for a new facility — a much larger building of its own — augmented and financed by a condominium tower that will rise alongside the new museum on the block south of Republic Square at Fourth and Guadalupe streets.

But the museum isn't the only arts organization headed for that part of downtown.

In June, Ballet Austin will open the doors to its Butler Dance Education Center at West Third and San Antonio streets. With multiple studios and a flexible performance space, the center promises to be a busy, all-hours hub of dance-making. Street-level windows will permit peeks into daytime ballet rehearsals or afternoon children's classes. Evenings and lunch hours will feature performances, giving more Austin dance makers more chances to flex their creative muscles.

Meanwhile, back on Congress Avenue, Arthouse soon will offer the first glimpses of its renovation plans while also expanding its spot as Austin's lab for innovative visuals. Think 12 community choirs and the Barton Springs salamander can't be creative fodder? Bulgarian-born Daniel Bozhkov does, and you can see the results beginning Saturday.

But the forthcoming season will be the last that the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Austin Lyric Opera and Ballet Austin will perform at the University of Texas' Bass Concert Hall.

Bass will close shortly after the spring run of "The Lion King," with its promise to be the largest Broadway show in Austin's history. And while the new Long Center for the Performing Arts is rising at South First Street and Riverside Drive, already we're seeing the temporary moves by some performing arts groups. The symphony, for example, will see its spring fill with pops concerts at the Palmer Events Center and Riverbend Centre. Meanwhile, mid-size to small classical music groups continue to fan out to use area churches — a workable, familiar solution.

Another change to the scene? Flood damage in June shuttered the State Theatre for at least the next art season. It's unfortunate that the theater's season had to be curtailed as well. But while some of the State Theatre Company's schedule will be absorbed by its sister venue, the Paramount Theatre, having the 300-seat historic Congress Avenue show house dark leaves several local dance companies — Tapestry, Kathy Dunn Hamrick, Puerto Rican Folkloric Dance — without their usual stage. Helm Fine Arts Center at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, UT's McCullough Theatre and the new Boyd Vance Theatre at the Carver Museum & Cultural Center will be new destinations for dance.

The Carver, joining the regular roster as an East Austin arts venue, is a welcome addition to the already busy bunch of warehouse theaters in that part of town. The Rude Mechanicals, Refraction Arts, Vortex and Salvage Vanguard, among other companies, continue to unfurl new work. And they continue to export too: The Rude Mechanicals are touring their popular, original show "Get Your War On" around the country, and Salvage Vanguard soon will take "The Intergalactic Nemesis" faux sci-fi radio show on the road.

Why not? Austin's physical landscape is a show garden. So is its arts landscape, especially as it comes into bloom.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699