The 1842 Old Capitol building on the campus of the University of Iowa. Image Matt Yohe at English Wikipedia, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – The University of Iowa plans to spend $1.5 million to renovate the Old Capital dome, which has already been destroyed in a fire and then reconstructed.
The school will renovate the iconic building’s roof and cupola, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported. University spokesman Tom Moore said the college has been monitoring the building’s condition and wants to take preventive action now so it doesn’t have to spend more money later.
Moore said repair work will include exterior finishes for the cupola. Other areas of concern include the building’s metal roofing and portions of the dome’s interior.
“Right now we’re in the stage where we’re investigating our options, working with the designers and contractors,” Moore said.
The Old Capital was built in 1842 and was used by lawmakers. It became the university’s first permanent building in 1857 after the Legislature moved to Des Moines.
A fire ripped through the cupola and dome in November 2001, causing significant water, soot and smoke damage throughout the building and ruining the upper tower.
Investigators said the blaze started when workers used open flame torches and heat guns to remove asbestos.
The university in 2004 settled a lawsuit against the contractor for $1.9 million, about a third of the estimated $5.6 million in damage.
A new dome was placed on the top of the Old Capital in February 2003. The building remained closed to the public until restoration work was complete in 2006.
“It’s a historic structure, and the rebuilt section is outside, it’s open to the elements, so no matter what, it’s going to take wear and tear just like a general house does,” said Shalla Wilson Ashworth, director of the university’s Pentacrest museums.
Actress Lauren Bacall. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and The Written Word Autographs. NEW YORK (AP) – Lauren Bacall had one condition when the Fashion Institute of Technology wrote recently to ask if it could turn hundreds of personal garments she donated into an exhibition about her style.
“She said, ‘Yes, it’s fine, as long as it’s high-quality – Diana Vreeland style,’” recalled Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at FIT.
Throughout her years, Bacall hadn’t forgotten the fashion editor who plucked her from a Seventh Avenue showroom floor and delivered her to Hollywood’s door via the pages of Harper’s Bazaar at age 19.
And next spring, Steele’s museum – with the help of FIT graduate students learning how to curate – will fulfill its promise in a show focused on five designers who helped define Bacall’s subtle seductiveness, her sophisticated mix of classic femininity and raw masculine authority in fashion.
Bacall, who died Tuesday at 89, was a fashion darling of a unique sort. A model at 16, later a pal of Yves Saint Laurent and a frequent wearer of designs by Norman Norell, she wore the clothes – not the other way around.
“She really epitomized this idea of effortlessness. It’s like she never was trying too hard and I think that sometimes is the most difficult thing to achieve,” said designer Peter Som.
“That gaze, the voice, the hair. It was just that confidence. That was something that I think men and women alike could relate to,” he said.
Among Som’s favorite Bacall fashion moments is a casual one from 1946. She’s leaning in a photo on a bent knee propped on a stool near a fireplace in a wool trouser and loose turtleneck suit designed by Leah Rhodes. The pleats are sharp and the sleeves billowy. The only skin bared: her feet, slipped into low-wedge slides, yet her piercing signature sideward glance and wave of long blond hair took the look in a new direction.
“She was the opposite of Marilyn Monroe’s overt sexuality, yet she still oozed sensuality out of every pore,” he said. “The clothes are so simple and so chic, and they still feel today so relevant. They feel like clothes you kind of want to wear.”
In fashion, on-screen and off, Bacall was the grown-up, even as a teen, said Som and others.
Eric Wilson, fashion news director for InStyle magazine, fondly notes her role turning the tables on the industry when she played a designer in the 1957 film Designing Woman.
“There’s this dress, what appears to be a pale gray sleeveless dress with a loosely draped halter top, and it turns out to be her wedding dress,” he explains.
After a hurried wedding, she goes into an airplane bathroom and changes, emerging in a stretchy navy day look, a mink stole wrapped around her shoulders with a hat and leather gloves.
“That transformation, it’s amazing. It kind of demonstrates her simple, exquisite glamour,” he said.
It’s the kind of transformation that led Steele to include in the upcoming exhibit a Norell dress done up entirely in hand-sewn gold sequins with a matching camel-color cashmere coat that’s plain on the outside but lined with matching sequins on the inside.
“Once you take the coat off, it’s va-va-va voom,” she said, “but covered up with the coat and you can wear it on the subway as just a simple little thing.”
The exhibit on FIT’s Manhattan campus will focus mostly on Bacall’s looks from the 1950s and ’60s. Some of her clothes by Norell will be joined by other designs Bacall donated from Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent and Ungaro.
Designer Isaac Mizrahi said her intellect is what helped Bacall put her mark on fashion. He explained it this way in the April 2001 issue of InStyle, looking back on her appearance at the Oscars in 1979:
“Wearing a 50-year-old Fortuny dress proved how smart Lauren Bacall was,” he said. “A smart Jewish girl from the Bronx who knew Norell as well as Loehmann’s. She’s our reference for what smart looks like. Look up ‘smart’ in the dictionary – you’ll find her picture.”
Style and beauty expert Mary Alice Stephenson said Bacall helped redefine beauty and femininity in fashion.
“Bacall made it sexy for all women to wear casual clothes. She would wear them in such a glamorous way,” she said. “She played up her makeup, hair and jewelry, all while wearing pants, button-down shirts, knits and flats.”
There were few who so successfully managed such a sexy masculine edge while also being capable of full-on glam, Steele said.
“She wore the dress or the pants. They didn’t wear her,” she said. “Some of what she wore didn’t look prim but it might have on others. Sometimes it was conservative-looking, but she wore it with such panache. It was a combination of Hollywood feminine glamour and masculine, androgynous insouciance and power. The only other person I can think of who could do that was (Marlene) Dietrich.”
Bacall was never elevated to muse for any one designer. Plenty, though, were touched by her style over the decades: Bill Blass, Perry Ellis, her friend Yves Saint Laurent, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren among them.
Karan, in an email Wednesday, pointed to Bacall’s sophistication and strength as someone who “inspired us all, especially those of us in the fashion world.”
Lauren said in an email that Bacall’s fashion legend relies on glamour that is “beautiful, bold and independent.”
As Som put it of his standout favorite that has Bacall at that fireplace in trousers and sweater: “It’s kind of a butch pose, you know, but she was just so cool.
“She was a real dame, an old soul even back then, with an innate sense of how to wear things, or not. How she carried that off was magic.”
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Image by Alvintrusty. This filed is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) – Researchers say the honeybees on the roof of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts have been thriving.
Minnesota Public Radio News reports that the bees are healthy, producing lots of honey and breeding. Museum staff and researchers from the University of Minnesota Bee Squad watch over the rooftop beehives.
The Bee Squad manages a dozen rooftop operations across the Twin Cities. The 11-member research unit also teaches bee colony care and advises beekeepers.
Researchers hope to address a widespread decline in bee populations. About half of the bees in Minnesota died during the harsh winter.
Minnesota is one of the top honey producing states in the country. It is home to more than 350 bee species.
Mao statue in Lijang, China. Image by Roy Niekerk. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Generic License. SHANTOU, China (AFP) – No signs along the long and dusty mountain road point the way to the Cultural Revolution museum complex.
And this year, no commemoration for the millions of victims of Mao Zedong’s mayhem was held on the anniversary of its start.
The mountaintop museum on the outskirts of Shantou chronicles an uncomfortable chapter of history that China’s ruling Communist Party would rather forget.
Neighbor was pitted against neighbor, child against parent, and the Red Guard student movement was tasked with purging ideological “foes,” often bloodily, as Mao forcefully reasserted his power over the party and the country following the disaster of his Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine.
“We came to this Cultural Revolution museum to cherish the memory of the victims, our compatriots,” said Liu Jingyi, 41, a business owner who brought his son and daughter.
“I talk to my children about the events of the past, and I tell them that in the future, they must conduct themselves with integrity and be upright, honest people,” he said.
The Communist Party officially declared Mao “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong,” and has said the Cultural Revolution dealt China “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949.
But it has never allowed a full reckoning of the turmoil that took place between 1966 and 1976.
“I feel quite ignorant about history. I came here to try to understand things better,” said a lone 20-year-old student surnamed Chen, perusing inscriptions of hundreds of crimes from the era: “Capitalism.” “False Marxism.” “False leftist, true rightist.”
The main exhibition hall contains a day-by-day account of the decade of violence and ideological frenzy, alongside hundreds of images of Mao and other party leaders, public shamings, beatings and killings.
Two vast red columns proclaim: “On heaven and earth, this calamitous history exists here alone. In all the world, what’s most important is the ability to judge right from wrong.”
‘Dead souls’
The privately funded museum was founded – with neither support nor outright opposition from Communist authorities – by Peng Qi’an, the former deputy mayor of Shantou, on China’s southern coast.
Peng’s brother, a teacher, was beaten to death and Peng, now 83, listed for execution. It was never carried out, for reasons unknown.
The sprawling complex includes long black walls bearing the names of several thousand victims, and since 2006 hundreds of their relatives have gathered every Aug. 8, the anniversary of the Communist Party Central Committee’s decision to launch the Cultural Revolution.
China’s official Xinhua news agency previewed last year’s ceremony and quoted Peng saying: “I promised the dead souls we would mourn them on this particular date every year, even if I have to climb up the mountain to their graves in a wheelchair.”
But this month’s event was called off at the last minute, apparently under pressure from the authorities. Shantou officials could not be reached for comment, but Peng stayed away from the museum, and declined to be interviewed for this article.
Under President Xi Jinping – whose chosen themes of anti-corruption and frugality echo some of Mao’s edicts – China has tightened its limits on freedom of expression, jailing human rights lawyers, journalists and activists.
In recent months official media have publicized the confessions of several former Red Guards, including Song Binbin, a powerful general’s daughter who participated in one of the first and most notorious killings of a teacher.
But such candor has strict limits.
The ruling party has allowed general criticism of the Cultural Revolution “because that’s the official stance,” said Barry Sautman, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Any discussion that touched the roles of specific leaders “would be a big problem,” he said.
“Politicians do what they do best, which is exercise power. If it’s to protect themselves, they’ll be sure to do so.”
More than 70 local residents killed during the Cultural Revolution are buried near the museum, thousands of others were persecuted, and many more are still haunted by the events of the time.
On the morning of the anniversary a few visitors defied the cancelation to attend.
A 72-year-old retiree, who declined to give his name for fear of retribution, said that in pre-Communist China his grandfather had been involved in legal proceedings that saw several people in Shantou executed.
During the Cultural Revolution, “the responsibility for this was placed on the head of my father” and he was killed, he said, determined to speak out but his quiet tone revealing his anxiety.
The family were declared “landowners” – the worst of the Communist Party’s “five black categories” of enemies.
“China today is still very factionalized,” he went on, tears welling in his eyes. “Some things are still not very clear. I worry that I might be harmed once again.”
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Mao statue in Lijang, China. Image by Roy Niekerk. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Generic License.
‘That’s Amore,’ oil on canvas, signed, titled and dated, 1996, 24 inches by 18 inches, $39,360. Photo courtesy of New Orleans Auction Galleries.
LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) – The George Rodrigue Foundation has announced the re-launch of its Print Donation Program, which has distributed more than 1,000 prints to over 500 organizations and raised almost $2 million since its inception in 2009.
Non-profit organizations can purchase a Rodrigue Blue Dog silkscreen print from the Rodrigue Estate for $500, then use the print for fundraising activities like silent auctions or raffles.
KATC-TV reports (http://bit.ly/1BfxzAH ) if the print purchase doesn’t raise more than the original $500 investment, the foundation will accept the print’s return and refund the $500.
The prints are not for sale in any Rodrigue Gallery and are only available to non-profit organizations.
All prints include a certificate of authenticity.
George Rodrigue was an artist from New Iberia, La., whose Blue Dog paintings made him famous. He died Dec. 14, 2013 at age 69.
Nonprofits can take advantage of this program by applying online at http://www.georgerodriguefoundation.org/printdonation
