Author: Kevin Lee

In a battle between beauty and a bug, the former will prevail. That’s Scott Wright’s aim anyway. The Mobile Opera general and artistic director has to get past an unwelcome visitor that has made the rounds this winter: the flu. It wasted no time settling in. “Thursday night, I was conducting rehearsals at the University of Mobile for the ‘Marriage of Figaro’ up there. We started at 6:30 and 7:30 or 8 o’clock we took a little break, and coming back from the break I was feeling dizzy, really bad, and told them ‘I think I need to excuse...

Mobile Arts Council had one goal with the 2018 Arty Awards: to raise the bar on both experience and expectation. Consider it met. The Jan. 18 shindig was the council’s second time around since revamping the previously tagged Greater Mobile Art Awards. The aim was to inject more panache with a change in name and format. Nominees in nine of the 11 categories were announced in late November and winners unveiled in an “Oscars-style” event. Winners of the Patron and Lifetime Achievement Award were released weeks before the big night. They traded last year’s setting of Alabama Contemporary Art...

If the midwinter blahs have you down, there’s a cure at the Saenger Theatre (6 S. Joachim St.) in late January. That’s when Mobile Symphony Orchestra will magically take attendees through a couple of calendars’ worth of music with the assistance of lauded international talent. One of the time-travel architects is Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi and the vessel is his best-known work. Known collectively as “Four Seasons,” the quartet of violin concertos have become a “go-to” piece for a wealth of modern media, from films to television ads. Written shortly after Vivaldi’s three years as maestro of the...

We find this rewarding and we’re still doing it because we think the arts are important. It takes so many people who aren’t creative and who aren’t out front to make things come together,” Donna McClung Camp said. The other part of the “we” is her husband, Joe. If you’re involved with Azalea City Arts, it’s likely you’ve seen this enthusiastic and gracious pair of volunteers over the years giving the most valuable asset any of us has: time. Joe defers to his wife — “She’s the eloquent member of the duo.” The husband part of me says that...

Art is a conversation. Between the artist, creation, participants and observers, communication is abundant in all directions. It’s a component we take for granted. Yet how much of the artist’s work is shaped by the time and place and, in kind, how much are the times and its denizens shaped by the artists? A specific version of those questions and our regional culture will be on the table Thursday, Jan. 11, at 6 p.m. in the Larkins Auditorium of the Mobile Museum of Art (4850 Museum Drive) for a panel discussion, “Jazz and African-American Consciousness.” The event is co-sponsored...

The Mobile Historic Development Commission will fill a top slot in 2018 as Deputy Director Cart Blackwell will leave in January for a slot in the private sector. It concludes his department stint months shy of the nine-year mark. “It’s hard to believe. It’s been almost a decade, so I spent the latter part of my 20s and the first part of my 30s here,” the Selma native said. Though young, his impact has been quickly felt in Mobile. Blackwell boasts affiliations with the Historic Mobile Preservation Society, the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Alabama...