WELCOME, KINGS

Arts Center's turnstile goal for pharaoh show: 300,000

— From the glass window along the back wall of her third-floor office in the Arkansas Arts Center, Executive Director Ellen "Nan" Plummer can see the new Egyptian-theme gift shop coming together, glimpse the new atrium, and soon, she hopes, take in the

throngs of people coming in

through the new ticketing tent

just outside.

The large white tent,

complete with glass doors, went

in earlier this month. There's also the new Oasis Cafe and a second outdoor patio for Best Impressions, along with more

cafe seating inside.

The center began readying for the "World of The Pharaohs:

Treasures of Egypt Revealed" exhibit

two years ago. It opens Friday.

And preparing for what Plummer

calls "the next big thing" has been no

small endeavor.

Thirteen new volunteer docents

have been trained. Some 30 new employees, including a guest curator and an exhibit designer, were hired.

Schools were contacted. Speakers and scholars recruited. An audio tour scripted and recorded.

And money, lots of it, was raised. The nonprofit center's budget for the fiscal year, which started July 1, jumped $1.8 million to $7.9 million, Plummer says.

The title sponsor of the event, Stephens Inc., contributed $250,000.

On Labor Day, nine center employees, five contracted riggers and three employees from the Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston, which is loaning the

exhibit, began the installation. The Boston crew arrived Aug. 24.

The center is spending abouthalf a million dollars to advertise the exhibit in Arkansas and sixnearby states. For those who've missed the glowing press, billboards and bus signs, the exhibit features more than 200 objects spanning 3,000 years of Egyptian dynastic history.

photo

Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Recurring event

World of the Pharaohs: Treasures of Egypt Revealed & Exotic Lands-Europe Imagines Egypt and the East

  • ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, Little Rock, AR
  • All ages / Free - $22

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There's a royal decree carved in limestone, burial artifacts, jewelry, furnishings and a colossus of Ramesses II fragment, which weighs in at 4,500 pounds, says Joseph Lampo, the center's in-house curator and deputy director of programs.

"The objects are very, very fine," Plummer says. "These are beautiful things made by very skilled, intelligent people."

On the Friday before Labor Day, workers were making sure the individually climate-controlled display cases made to house those fine objects sealed precisely.

"That's the issue du jour," Lampo says.

There have been many such issues to work out for the exhibit, which will take up 7,500 square feet of gallery space at the museum at East Ninth and Commerce, Little Rock. Another 2,000 square feet are available for rotating exhibits and the museum will use the Winthrop Rockefeller Gallery, which encompasses 3,700 square feet, to display two changing exhibitions later this year, Plummer says. That gallery is normally reserved for the museum's permanent collection.

The museum expects the exhibit to draw 300,000 people. A little more than two weeks before the grand opening, 32 adult groups with 1,300 people had made reservations along with 104 school groups with 4,531 students and teachers, says Plummer, who expects group bookings to continue to increase. The exhibit was recently named a Top 100 Event for 2010 by the American Bus Association.

Soon to be gone are the days of "coming to the museum on a Tuesday afternoon and having it all to yourself," she says.

Plummer expects certain patterns: mornings will bring school groups, afternoons motor coaches and weekends and nights the general public. Tickets will be timed on the half hour to make the exhibit run more smoothly and allow up to 300 people an hour to view it.

So many people are expected, the museum will open earlier and close later. Normally the museum is open from 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m .-5p.m. Sundays. From Tuesdays through Fridays, the museum will instead open at 9 a.m., and on Tuesdays it will stay open until 8:30 p.m. On Saturdays and Sundays, hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

While the center is normally closed Mondays, the last day of the exhibit falls on a Monday, the Independence Day weekend, and the center will stay open.

"We want as many people as possible, especially Arkansans, to see it," Plummer says.

So does Dan O'Byrne, the chief executive officer of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is a lead sponsor of the event, contributing $100,000. The Capital Hotel also contributed $100,000 as a lead sponsor.

The exhibit will be a boon to restaurants and hotels, O'Byrne says, but also shops and gas stations. The "direct exposure" will bring millions of dollars to the city, he says. But just how many millions is speculative at this point. The bureau won't run the numbers until after the exhibit is up and running for a while, he says. They'll use calculations largely based on hotelbookings.

This summer the Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission approved granting the center $50,000 to launch an advertising campaign for hotel packages for the exhibit. Eleven hotels are offering packages on the center's Web site: pharaoh. arkarts.com.

O'Byrne doesn't think it's ambitious to expect a roughly 10-month exhibit to draw as many visitors as the Clinton Presidential Center. After its first year, which saw around 492,000 visitors, attendance was around 300,000 its second year.

"There's a 10-month window before it goes away for a long time," O'Byrne says of the show.

"We view this as a real gift to the entire community," O'Byrne says. "It introduces Little Rock to a whole new audience. It gives us something to sell for the next 10 months."

The 300,000 estimate is based on attendance for similar events, adjusting for population, Plummer says. The exhibit has been to two other museums, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Quebec and the Museum of Idaho in Boise. Its last stopwill be at Alabama's Huntsville Museum of Art.

Being one of just four cities to host the exhibit will benefit Arkansas and bring new prestige to the state's art scene, Plummer says.

"It demonstrates we as an institution can handle some of the finest and most difficult to draw objects on the planet. As far as audiences go, Arkansas has never seen a show of art from one of the founding civilizations of the human race and now we will have had that. That's going to make a big difference."

The museum didn't set out to display ancient Egyptian artifacts two years ago, she says.

"We were sort of looking for the next big thing," Plummer says. "It became available when we needed something."

She sees the exhibit as evidence of the center's upward trajectory, following other recent exhibits including the "Pursuing Picasso" show in 2005.

"Egyptian art really captures the imagination. It's beautiful, for one thing. It's mysterious - you know, long ago and far away. But at the same time, we can lookat these objects and connect with these people as people.

"We can imagine ourselves wearing something like this," she says, fingering a calendar picture of a green beaded dress during a recent interview in her office. "We all die," she says, pointing to a picture of a mummy.

Egyptian exhibits undoubtedly fascinate, particularly those with ties to Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died at 19 more than 3,000 years ago. The contents of his burial chamber were undisturbed until 1922.

The "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art was the most popular in the museum's history, according to a June news release from the museum. From October 2008 to May, it drew 664,000 ticket holders. But museum officials had hoped to draw 1 million.

Plummer thinks the Pharaohs show will appeal to those who didn't make it to Dallas, as well as people who saw it and enjoyed it.

"We've got 3,000 years of Egyptian history, not just one king," Plummer says.

Lampo says the exhibit demonstrates the life, or world, of the pharaohs. "It's not about King Tut, it's about an average life."

Besides, Tut isn't the only familiar pharaoh about, O'Byrne points out.

"I'm more intrigued because one of the kings featured in this is Ramesses II, the Egyptian Pharaoh everyone's familiar with because we all watched Yul Brynner portray him in The Ten Commandments."

But Ramesses may not sell as well in at least one place - the center's new gift shop, the Egyptian Market. There toddlers can get plastic plates with Tut, upper shelves makespace for Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs by Zahi Hawass, and for those who want to go all out there are King Tut hats.

The shop is also brimming with scarab beetles and sarcophagi with mini mummies. There are books for all ages, including this one for preschoolers: Where's My Mummy?

Ninety percent of the items are from Egypt, says Laura Hanson, one of the Egyptian Market managers leading a visitor through an array of camel T-shirts, bookmarks, silver letter openers and turquoise tunics.

"Some will be very, very expensive, others not so much," Hanson says of the shop's offerings.

Arkansas Arts Center members will get free entry to the exhibit and discounts in the museum shop. An individual membership costs $55.

Plummer says she expects 3,000 new members as a result of the exhibit.

The center hopes revenue from admission, the shops and cafes and new memberships will put the exhibit in the black. Any profit will go to future programs, Plummer says.

"We hope the people will see the exhibit and then shop and eat," she says.

Bring on the crowds. The center's ready.

Exhibition "World of the Pharaohs: Treasures of Egypt Revealed"

Friday

-July 5; $22, ages 60 and older $20, college students $18, military $15, children $14, children 5 and under free. Various ticket packages are available. Tickets are timed and dated; allow 60 to 90 minutes for viewing.

Arkansas Arts Center, Mac-Arthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock. Hours have extended for "World of the Pharaohs": 9 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Tuesday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday and 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Arts Center has organized "Exotic Lands: Europe Imagines Egypt and the West," with works by Paul Cezanne, Eugene Delacroix, Paul Signac and others.Friday-Nov. 22. Curator of Drawings Phaedra Siebert will present a lecture about the exhibit at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 1 in the Arts Center's lecture hall.

Special Museum School classes and workshops are planned during the exhibition's run, $20-$220, for a list go to

bharaoh.arkarts.com.

Lectures:

Sameh Shoukry, ambassador of Egypt to the United States, will speak at noon Wednesday at The Clinton School of Public Service, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock. For reservations, call (501) 683-5239.

"Secret of the Great Pyramid: A New Theory of How It Was Built," by Bob Brier, 1 p.m. Thursday, Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Ave.

Information: arkarts.com

or

bharaoh.arkarts.com

or call (501) 372-4000.

Style, Pages 55, 60 on 09/20/2009

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