The only fine arts festival in the state, UL Lafayette’s Festival of the Arts, begins today. The week long celebration highlights programs from the university’s fine art departments: film, architecture, music, dance, design, printmaking, painting and sculpture. Six days of activities ramble all over Lafayette, from the UL campus to River Ranch, and finally wind up at a grand finale at Iberia Bank downtown. George Rodrigue, a former student in the university’s art program, will be honored with a SPARK lifetime achievement award, says Dean of the College of the Arts Gordon Brooks.
Today, the festival kicks off with a fashion show dubbed “Cajun Flage.” Students from first-year design and fashion design studios have crafted and will model apparel based on Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline.” As a counterpoint to the nineteenth-century poem, the clothes are made out of camouflage fabric — a contemporary ode to local culture. The show will take place at 6 p.m. in the main gallery space of the ACA. For the rest of the week-long schedule, check out the College of the Arts Web site.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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