Reprise | Gayle Seymour, Associate Dean, College of Arts, University of Central Arkansas

Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy

Today on Up In Your Business you will be swept away as art history professor Gayle Seymour, Associate Dean at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, teaches us about Arkansas’s history and culture. Gayle wrote the grant that led to the 60-year Central High Little Rock Nine reunion where President Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker. We will hear how Gayle commissioned the Cuban born composer, Tania Leon, to score a dramatic opera about the “Little Rock Nine” and enlisted Henry Louis Gates to write the libretto (words). This project has been stalled due to the pandemic of 2020, but we will preview a little of the opera on today’s show. We will also learn about Japanese American Internment art and get an excerpt from its most famous Arkansas resident Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu, George Takei. Other areas of Gayle’s expertise inclued American art, Women in Art, and my favorite, Depression-era post office murals (think Norman Rockwell on a wall). Over 1400 murals were painted during the 1930’s and 40’s, as part of the New Deal, nineteen of which are located in Arkansas. And if that is not enough, she is an avid collector of antique Dolls! Listen and get a lesson on an array of interesting topics from this very interesting person.