Work underway on First Orion, plaza
Work has begun in downtown North Little Rock on the $10 million First Orion headquarters site and the city-owned, $4 million Argenta Plaza that will be in front of First Orion just off Main Street.
The 42,000-square-foot plaza will be on the east side of Main Street between Fifth and Sixth streets. First Orion, a company that develops and sells software for cellphones, will relocate from Little Rock into the planned five-story building directly behind the plaza.
A short ceremony was held Thursday morning to note the start of work. Construction equipment was placed on the properties shortly afterward. Construction is scheduled to be completed on both within a year, city officials said.
The plaza is also to have a mixed-use building that will house a restaurant on the plaza's north side. No tenant has been named yet.
Just to the north of the restaurant building, the North Little Rock Convention and Visitor Bureau's new headquarters is planned to be built as part of a three-story building that will include the Arkansas Automobile Dealers Association and Taggart Architects, with a rooftop deck. Each tenant will take up its own floor in the building.
Thea Foundation increases funding
The nonprofit Thea Foundation, headquartered in North Little Rock's Argenta Arts District, will increase the number of scholarships it awards and double the amount of grant money used to provide art supplies to classrooms throughout Arkansas, the foundation recently announced.
There will be six new scholarships awarded for 2019 by the foundation, expanding its creative writing and poetry slam categories from two scholarships each to five in each category.
Registration is open for scholarship competitions in visual arts, performing arts, fashion design, film, poetry slam and creative writing. For 2018-2019, the foundation's competition awarded 36 scholarships totaling $97,500.
Thea's Art Closet, the program that provides teachers' art supplies, previously awarded $25,000 in grants that are matched by corporate sponsors. The amount is being increased to $50,000 that will be leveraged to as much as $125,000 in funding arts supplies to school classrooms, according to the foundation. The program distributed $63,000 with 72 grants across the state last year.
More information about Thea programs is available at theafoundation.org.
Maritime museum raises admission
Visiting North Little Rock's Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum on the Arkansas River will cost more under a new proposal by city Parks and Recreation Director Terry Hartwick.
The proposal would raise adult admission from $7.50 to $10; ages 62 and older and military memberadmission from $5 to $7.50; birthday party rentals from $75 to $95; and overnight sleepovers from $350 to $400.
The North Little Rock Parks Commission will consider the proposed increases at its meeting Monday.
Hartwick said the reason is to keep up with expenses.
"It costs more to do stuff," Hartwick said. "It's as simple as that. For the birthday parties, we have to have someone on-site at all times.
"I don't think it's going to turn anybody away," Hartwick said of the cost increase.
The museum is home to the World War II Hoga tug and the Razorback submarine. The Hoga was at Pearl Harbor during the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base that plunged the United States into World War II. The Razorback was among the fleet present in Tokyo Bay for Japan's formal surrender Sept. 2, 1945.
Art gallery opens modernism exhibit
The exhibit, "American Perspectives on Modernism," opened Monday at the Windgate Gallery in the Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock.
The exhibit will continue through Oct. 19. Exhibits are free and open to the public during regular center hours.
The works are from the collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. They include works by American modernists such as Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Sheeler and Max Weber.
Metro on 08/19/2018