'TWO SCOTS': Dog art at the Walton.

Gallery 26, the Hillcrest gallery and frame shop, will celebrate its 10th year in business Feb. 7. It’s marking the event early with an exhibit of representational drawings and paintings by Little Rock artist Michael Lierly. Co-owner Renee Williams said a reception with refreshments and live music from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. will open the show Saturday, Jan. 22.
Lierly, a graduate of the Savannah School of the Arts, has exhibited in several cities, hanging his first one-man show at the Historic Arkansas Museum in 2003. The show at Gallery 26 is his first exhibit of drawings and paintings done since his student days.
Since its opening, Gallery 26 has held dozens of exhibits of Arkansas artists, from the well-known (like painter and sculptor Kevin Kresse, painter Katherine Strause and photographer Benjamin Krain) to newcomers.
The Historic Arkansas Museum opens two new exhibits Thursday, Jan. 20, and its “Arkansas Made” bread-and-butter show is back.
The Smithsonian Institute’s traveling exhibit “Creativity and Resistance: The Maroon Cultures of America” uses artifacts, pictures and recordings to tell the story of escaped African slaves and others who managed to create free communities. The exhibit focuses on the “Maroon” (“fugitive” in Spanish) communities from the 16th to the 19th century to contemporary descendents in Jamaica, Suriname, French Guiana and Texas, where Seminole-African American Maroons settled. The exhibit runs through March 20.
“Books and Papers” features letters and other writings from the HAM archives by Arkansans of the 19th and 20th centuries, expressions of private and public life of the times. The exhibit runs through Aug. 21.
“Arkansas Made,” portraits, silver, ceramics, historical photographs by and about Arkansans, also from the HAM’s own collection, runs through Aug. 21.
Fayetteville’s contribution to the arts this month includes a show of wood sculpture and ceramics by Arizona artist Jeremy Briddell at the University of Arkansas and a whimsical show of dog portraits by Texas artist Michael McWillie at the Walton Arts Center.
Briddell, a visiting artist at the UA, will direct a salt kiln workshop in the university’s new ceramics studio Jan. 24 through Jan. 28. His exhibit, in the Fine Arts Building gallery, features large-scale wood sculptural “collages” and small porcelain pieces. He’ll give a lecture at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24 in Room 213 of the Fine Arts Center. The show runs through Feb. 11.
McWillie, whose portrait of First Lady Laura Bush’s Scottish terrier, Barney, hangs in the White House, owns an advertising and design firm and makes his art in a barn on his ranch in Parker, Texas. His show, “The Seen and Unseen,” personifies dogs and explores their “secret lives.” The exhibit, in the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery, runs through March 19.

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