Review: A TALE OF TWO FLURFFYS at Arkansas Museum Of Fine Arts

Bonjour! If you are looking for an international trip with the tiny kiddos but don’t necessarily want to fly to Paris, join our friends at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock for their final showing of A TALE OF TWO FLURFFYS this Saturday, July 27 at 11am & again at 12pm as Flurffy goes missing. Written by the extremely talented Chad Bradford, this cute interactive 30-minute show which stars a couple of fun-loving pink fluffy puppet dogs is free to the public thanks to the Alice L. Walton Foundation.  

Flurffy and her human companion, played by the animated Emily Swenskie, are vacationing in Paris and are about to head home on a plane when Flurffy wanders off after a bee visitation. Are they going to miss their flight?  After she looks and looks for Flurffy, she sees her, or does she? No, it’s her cousin from Ireland who looks identical to Flurffy. Through a series of songs, Irish dancing, making new friends and a reading from a book, Flurffy does return, and all is well.  

For this show Emily is joined by Lanie Carlson and Aaron Burnside who take on different characters and handle the other puppets that help with the storytelling. The show starts as you enter the venue space with the actors interacting with the audience by passing out stamps and pretending to be vendors selling berets. The best part about the show is that the kids are so responsive to everything that happens in this story. The actors involve the audience by asking questions and even have them participate in solving problems. It is so much fun and everyone has a great time.  

Also going on Saturday, AMFA encourages the little ones to create artwork during Creative Saturdays, where they will have various mediums that could include glue, paint, glitter, and other fun textures to make a masterpiece. Then, they can embark on an adventure with a Treasure Map from Guest Services. All of this is free. Creative Saturdays are supported by Garver and the Alice L. Walton Foundation. The Windgate Art School is generously supported by the Windgate Foundation.  

Even if you don’t have a little one, it is time to come back to the museum if you haven’t been here in awhile. They are constantly changing themes to keep the experience fresh, and from now through August 25, they have the "Delta Triennial" exhibition. According to their website, “For more than 60 years, the Delta exhibition has elevated and promoted awareness of artists born in or working in Arkansas and its surrounding states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. Founded by AMFA in 1958 as a juried exhibition, the Delta is named after the fertile floodplains surrounding the Mississippi River and seeks to amplify artistic voices in the Mid-South as they reflect complex histories and shifts in the cultural landscape. Since establishing the Delta exhibition, AMFA has consistently collected art produced by artists from the Mid-South and displayed it in context with our nationally and internationally recognized collection. In so doing, AMFA elevates awareness of the artistic diversity of the region and illustrates that American art is not monolithic but comprised of many voices.” There were so many different thought-provoking pieces, but my favorite was Texas Soundings: Let Your Voice Be Heard by Colette Copeland. This is a sound installation in four parts and is placed in different areas of the museum. They are recordings of various voices of people historically silenced, “specifically female, non-binary, and queer voices.” They were asked to speak their truths to the universe using phrases and sounds in their native tongues. It was so cool to wander around looking for the next sound box to hear what was being amplified. I urge you to go check it out. "Delta Triennial" is presented by Anne and Merritt Dyke. Additional support provided by Friday, Eldredge & Clark, LLP and the Andre Simon Memorial Trust Fund in memory of everyone who has died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). 

In the digital room they have Karen Mahaffy: A Particular Quality of Loss, which will run until February. For this experience, “Karen Mahaffy reconstructs her childhood bedroom’s flowered wallpaper as a digital animation. A haunting sepia-colored fog drifts over the entire image, as surprising moments of digital erosion occur. The viewer waits expectantly for a flower to pixilate and drop, wondering where the next will fall and then reconstitute itself. The silent waiting is actively meditative and rewarded by hypnotic transformations.” It truly is mesmerizing. I was trying to ingrain encouragement while watching it to see if I could hypnotize myself into being a better version of myself. I can’t tell if it worked, but it was a fun experiment.    

For more information about exhibits and other events, visit their website at https://arkmfa.org.  

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