The Brown County Art Guild features the artwork of its members in shows throughout the year, and each fall collaborates with other community groups to host the Brown County Art Colony Weekend. This year the weekend will be held September 7–9.
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Music festivals are booming across the country, but the vast majority of acts still feature men. MidWay Music Festival is breaking that trend, giving female musicians more of a place on the stage.
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When Indiana University alumni make the trek back to Bloomington this year, they and their families will have even more to explore. That’s because the Quarry Festival of Books, sponsored by IU Press and Bloom Magazine, has moved from an end-of-summer event to one that coincides with homecoming weekend.
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Moira Smiley discovered the power of her voice in Bloomington. When she came to the Indiana University School of Music in 1994, she intended to major in piano performance. But as she connected with local musicians such as Malcolm Dalglish, she gravitated toward the study of folk music, folklore, and ethnomusicology, ultimately receiving her degree in early music vocal performance.
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Laura Brikmanis’ theater mural adorns the exterior of the Bloomington Playwrights Project’s Ted Jones Playhouse and you can find her bees on one side of the 2nd Street Artisan Alley building.
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How does a court commissioner from southern Indiana become a western swing music sensation and win the Academy of Western Artists’ Western Swing Album of the Year? Ask fiddler, Bret Raper, 57, whose first album, Somewhere Near Austin, earned him the coveted award in March.
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In October 1994, about 800 people gathered in downtown Bloomington for the city’s first-ever world music festival. Organized by Lee Williams, James Combs, and Shahyar Daneshgar, the festival was a one-night event featuring a dozen international performers on three stages.
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The Bloomington Blues & Boogie Woogie Piano Festival bounces back into town August 11–13 for its fourth annual showcase of American keyboard music.
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In the early 1950s, about the time Elvis Presley cut a record and changed the sound of popular music, anyone could walk into a recording booth at a drugstore, pay a couple of bucks, perform a song, and have it etched directly into vinyl. Now, Phonocraft Record Manufacturing has resurrected that technology, offering one-off and small-batch records.
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Cardinal Stage will wrap up its season with a production of the musical Fun Home, a story of repressed intimacy, disillusionment, and love against steep odds.
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Three escape room businesses—simulated entertainment experiences likened to live versions of the board game Clue—have opened in Bloomington within the last year. They’re among about 50 such businesses in Indiana, and more than 2,100 nationwide.
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Sportswriter Stan Sutton’s The Curse of the Indy 500: 1958’s Tragic Legacy centers on a massive crash that killed one driver and seemingly cast a jinx on many others. Chapter by chapter, Sutton recounts the accidents that, over the years, took the lives of a dozen other drivers in that year’s race
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Originating in the late 1800s, the distinct vocal stylings of barbershop singing—generally a quartet singing a capella-style in four-part harmony—is still performed by groups dedicated to its preservation. One such group is Sounds of Indiana, a Bloomington-based chorus chartered by the Barbershop Harmony Society in 1976.
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In the fall of 2018, if all goes according to plan, audiences will get their first look at The Klaxon, a 47-minute art film about identity and race in America, shot in 360-degree video, largely in Bloomington.
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From the already notorious to the up-and-coming, bold and innovative women’s voices will lead the 2018 Limestone Comedy Festival. According to festival co-founders Jared Thompson, owner of the Comedy Attic, and comedian Matt Alano-Martin, booking a diverse roster of female voices was calculated to reverberate with the #MeToo movement times.
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Although Jason Odell Williams’ 2017 play Church & State is a comedy, its message addresses the timely issues of gun control, religion, and the influence of social media on politics. Church & State will be presented by the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center in May.
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In conjunction with April’s celebration of the environment, and Earth Day on April 22, Bloomington residents Bess and Joe Lee will present Professor Animalia’s Menagerie of Struggling Species—Save the Animals; Save Yourself! at the Blueline Gallery, 212 W. 4th St., April 6–30.
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For more than a decade, photographer Richard Ross has been traveling the country to document America’s juvenile justice system. Now, his photographs of incarcerated youth are on view at Bloomington City Hall through the month of April.
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Bach and his contemporaries would be surprised if they were to attend modern concerts of their works. The baroque style of performance was different, as were the instruments themselves—string instruments, for example, were constructed with animal intestines, not steel, and bows were of a different design. But Bloomington audiences will be able to hear something closer to what the composers intended during the Bloomington Early Music Festival May 18–27.
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Sometimes one thing leads to another—and in the case of Words! A Bloomington Celebration of Poetry and Spoken Word, that’s a beautiful thing, says Danielle McClelland, executive director of the Buskirk-Chumley Theater (BCT). From March 2–7, organizations from the community are coming together to celebrate the spoken word at venues across the city and on the Indiana University campus.
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