Day” and left us way too soon. Holly’s name will soon grace Lubbock’s impressive new Performing Arts Center, boosting the city’s appeal to lovers of ballet, Broadway, bluegrass, and all manner of stage and screen works. West Texas’ musical heritage is showcased not only in its abundance of ven- ues and live performances today — with artists rang- ing from the Flatlanders and Terry Allen to the fiddlers’ competitions and repertoire companies of the Cactus Theater — but in Tech’s Crossroads Music Archive, housed in the university’s Southwest Collection. Ask artist-in-residence Andy Wilkinson or curator Curtis Peoples for a tour. Or if your time in Lubbock is short, a brief stroll around the Lubbock Walk of Fame, in the Buddy and Maria Elena Holly Plaza (1824 Crickets Ave.), will introduce you to stars from Mac Davis and Waylon Jennings to Natalie Maines and Jo Harvey Allen.
But during the era in which Lubbock reconstructed itself from the ground up following a devastat- ing tornado in 1970, the community began to build on its musical roots — and the legacy of such figures as frequent visitor and “Pastel Poet of the Plains” Frank Reaugh — to rec- ognize the cadre of contemporary performers, painters, producers, and more who had also gravitated here. The growing reach of Texas
Tech University, so designated in 1969 after 44 years as Texas Technical College, surely played a part back then: practicing and teaching faculty artists of the time such as Eddie Dixon, Lynwood Kreneck, Paul Milosevich and Sara Waters have left their stamp now on ensuing decades of artists. Poet and professor of English Walter McDonald served an influential term as poet laureate of Texas. Faculty in music, dance and theatre propelled the community to profes- sional levels.
Later sculptors such as Glenna Goodacre, clay artists such as “Grandmaster of Clay” James C. Watkins and painter Kenneth
Buddy Holly’s guitar licks live on in bronze, at the Lubbock Walk of Fame.
the Arts (LHUCA, which locals pro- nounce LOO-kah) and Charles Adams Studio
Project
(CASP), make for a lively evening any time of year.
Dixon have continued the tradi- tion, now well established in Lubbock and environs. Venues like the Tornado Gallery, the Buddy Holly Center, the Blue Light Live and the restored Cactus Theater in the Depot District (along Buddy Holly Avenue and Crickets Avenue from 19th to 16th Streets), and the nine repurposed structures that make up the campus of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for
The Legacy of LHUCA and CASP THE ARRIVAL on the scene of LHUCA in 1997 — the organi- zation is laying tracks for a grand year of cel- ebrating its 20th anni- versary next year — forged Lubbock into a bona fide community of the arts. Founding patron Louise H. Underwood and a small group of local leaders recognized that Lubbock needed a location where all disciplines of the arts
could come together. The vacant city fire station situated on the industrial northern edge of down- town was deeded to the fledging organization in 2000, and the rede- signed Firehouse still functions as the heart of LHUCA’s now 64,000- square-foot campus in Lubbock’s Cultural District. Central to LHUCA’s mis- sion “to cultivate and celebrate all
the arts by inspiring creativity and engaging with the community” is the wildly popular, 11-year-old First Friday Art Trail, which now draws up to 4,000 visitors monthly to experience venues throughout the Cultural District and beyond — with free trolley transportation among most venues. “It’s an exciting time at
LHUCA right now,” says LHUCA director Jean Caslin, a veteran of the Houston arts scene who migrated to Lubbock in 2015. “We aim to be the Center for the visual, perform- ing and literary arts in the South Plains and beyond. We’re reaching
Ezio Gribaudo: Theaters of Memory Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts April 1–May 28, 2016
Join LHUCA, with the patron- age of The CH Foundation and the collaboration of Texas Tech University, as it hosts the work of internationally recog- nized artist and art publisher Ezio Gribaudo from April 1 to May 28, 2016. Born in 1929, Gribaudo is a world traveler with artistic roots in modern- ism, surrealism, and abstract art, who has exhibited a wide variation of beautiful paintings, prints, and sculptures world- wide.
First Friday Art Trail visitors enjoy LHUCA’s exhibi- tion of work by Eric Simpson and Johnnie Thurston.
SPRING 2016 59
FROM TOP: BARBARA BRANNON/TEXAS PLAINS TRAIL; TONYA HAGY-VALDINE
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