Artists Talk with LVA: February 15, 2024

Paul Lenzi & Geraldine Ann Snyder will be honored with the Kathi E.B. Ellis Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Arts-Louisville Theatre Awards and they were in the WXOX studios to talk about their work. Tune into Artists Talk with LVA every Thursday at 10 am on 97.1 WXOX-FM or stream on Artxfm.com

Paul Lenzi and Geraldine Ann Snyder returned to Louisville where they were hired by the Louisville Children’s Theater (now Stage One) to develop new musical programming for pre-schoolers while Paul ultimately became executive director. In 1976, the couple broke away to form the Blue Apple Players, continuing for a time a weekly children’s program on WAVE-TV. Blue Apple, for the first decade, operated on a “for profit” business model, performing locally and regionally for children sometimes in large halls or occasionally developing a didactic performance for a corporation. After becoming a non-profit, the theater company focused exclusively on creating musicals on cutting-edge social topics for Kentucky school groups. Blue Apple merged in 2015 with the Walden Theatre to form the Commonwealth Theatre Center.

Artebella On The Radio: March 25

The 2021 Arts-Louisville Theatre Awards will live stream this March 25, and as a part of this year's special edition, Angelica Santiago & Crystian Wiltshire talk about being BIPOC actors working out of Louisville. Join us this Thursday on WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com at 10 am.

Angelica Santiago, a multicultural chica born and raised Jersey native, is an actress telling the stories that need to be told. Having graduated from Montclair State University with her BFA in acting she uses the skills towards her craft to connect with people around the world and dive into her work in an even more personal way. Angelica's passion for acting comes from her desire to inspire audiences from all over and allow them to be affected by the stories of people that must share what they have to say. She was apart of the 2018-19 Actors Theatre of Louisville Acting Apprenticeship and has continued to work off and on in Louisville for Actors Theatre, Kentucky Shakespeare, and the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.

Crystian Wiltshire is originally from Brooklyn, New York but is an alumnus of the African American Theatre Program at the University of Louisville Department of Theatre Arts. He has worked with Stage One Family Theatre, Kentucky Shakespeare, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, and the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.

Artebella On The Radio: February 20, 2020

At the Arts-Louisville/Broadway World Theatre Awards on Feb. 24, tribute will be paid to the late Kathi Ellis of Looking for Lilith Theatre and Juergan Tossman of Bunbury Theatre. This week Juergan will be joined us along with Shannon Wooley Allison & Jennifer Thalman Kepler from Looking for Lilith. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10:00am to hear Keith Waits talk with artists.

Juergen K. Tossmann is an actor, director, and playwright and the producing artistic director of Bunbury Theatre for 30+ years. He was recruited to the position after starring in one Bunbury show and directing another. He has seen the company through a few moves, landing in the Henry Clay Building in 2008, where they now share space with two other local companies, Pandora Productions and The Liminal Playhouse. On Feb. 24 he will receive the lifetime achievement award at the Arts-Louisville/BWW Theatre Awards.

Shannon Wooley Allison was a founding member of LFL in 2001. She oversees the development of the company and the execution of our mission in creating both performances and residencies that speak to the needs of those whose voices are unheard. Shannon performs, directs, and teaches for LFL. For the last 15 years, she has free-lanced as an actor, director, and teaching artist, in addition to her work with LFL. She is proud to be a roster artist for the KY Arts Council, and a member of Alternate ROOTS, The Network of Ensemble Theatres, The Alliance for Theatre in Education, and The Theatre Alliance of Louisville.

Jennifer Thalman Kepler manages LFL’s Community Outreach department including LFL’s award winning program, CHOICES: An Interactive Play on Cyberbullying and Suicide, The Faith Stories Project, in-school drama residencies, afterschool programs and summer camps. Jennifer is also an actor, director and playwright with the company. While in NYC, Jennifer worked for five years as a freelance teaching artist, integrating drama into math and social studies curriculum, facilitating arts-based violence prevention programs and directing youth theatre.

For the 6th consecutive year, Arts-Louisville.com, a Regional Editor for Broadway World, will host an awards ceremony honoring excellence in local theatre, including live entertainment in the form of musical numbers from award recipients.

2020 Arts-Louisville.com/Broadway World Theatre Awards
February 24, 2020 - doors open at 6:00 pm
Art Sanctuary, 1433 South Shelby Street

Feature: Vinhay Keo's Confront at Moremen Moloney Gallery

On March 1, 2018, Louisville Visual Art Honors The Stars Among Us, a luncheon event which will recognize artists and patrons in four categories:

Vinhay Keo - Rising Star Award - In Memory of Bob Thompson
Wilma Bethel - Visual Art Educator Award - In Memory of Anna Huddleston
Porter Watkins - Benefactor of the Year Award - In Memory of Charlotte Price
Elmer Lucille Allen - Legacy Award - In Memory of Julius Friedman

This review, reprinted with permission, discusses Vinhay Keo's fall 2017 solo exhibit in Louisville. 

Confront – Vinhay Keo

Moremen Moloney Gallery
September 15 – October 14, 2017

Review by Keith Waits. Originally published by Arts-Louisville in October 2017.

Entire contents copyright © 2017 Keith Waits. All rights reserved.

Louisville has a thriving visual arts scene, but it lacks a meaningful representation of installation work with the artist’s personal involvement. It happens in other cities, but most exhibition spaces here tend to traffic in fairly traditional presentations. Academic galleries tend to come closest to fulfilling this need, but even they offer such programming intermittently.

Vinhay Keo is only a little more than a year out of the BFA program at Kentucky College of Art + Design at Spalding University (KyCAD), and Moremen Moloney Contemporary Gallery is hosting his first solo exhibition, Confront. The Cambodian-born artist here follows up on his work from the school’s 2016 BFA exhibit, some of which is included here.

Like many artists at this age, Keo is preoccupied with identity. His experience of moving to Bowling Green Kentucky and searching for a place in a smaller American community is realized through a monochromatic aesthetic in which the artist is continually surrounded, nay, overwhelmed by the color white. The Moremen Moloney environs, a renovated home, provide an interesting format by forcing the elements into individual rooms. Keo himself stands in the center of the first room on the left, motionless and silent, naked from the waist up, his lower half wrapped in white fabric and his neck adorned with a stiff white collar from which emerges a long white tie. The tie transitions from broadcloth to a twisted cord that reaches out of the room, across the hall and into the opposite room, where it disappears into an enormous, multi-peaked mound of confetti that is, of course, white.

The hallway displays photographic images printed on aluminum, five of which are specifically created for Confront, and several others that are from his time at KyCAD and the BFA exhibit. In the live installation, Keo’s brown skin is rich and warm in contrast to all of the white. The interior décor is analogous to the austerity of Keo’s imagery, and he has dusted his natural skin tone with white powder on his shoulders.

In the photographs, Keo is mostly covered in white make-up, even graying his black hair, or wearing white clothes. His mouth emits viscous white fluid filled with suggestiveness, and in the most striking picture, he appears to vomit a profusion of confetti.

We can draw from all of this that Keo has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to fit into a Caucasian world and that the effort very likely confused the artist’s own sense of himself, his own individual identity. Subsumed by a culture of Bible-belt social mores and backyard barbecues, and with, what we must presume, was a surfeit of similarly brown-skinned neighbors, what degree of denial and willful ignorance must have colored Keo’s own view of himself?

That quality of isolation is pointedly conveyed in this performance installation, set as it is in a high-end exhibition space that draws a well-to-do, predominantly white audience. As Keo stands, stone-faced, the viewers move around him sipping wine and blithely commenting on the artist and his work as if he weren’t within earshot. Is this a replication of Keo’s early life in Bowling Green? The Cambodian boy as the Other? Not fully a citizen and therefore not deserving of full social embrace? If so, Keo has provocatively forced the viewer to be complicit in realizing his statement.

The expression of his thesis is highly intellectual, but the imagery is emotionally charged. And if one stands in the room with Keo, listening to the self-satisfied chatter surrounding him, it is not difficult to empathize with his position. We might expect an artist coming from this experience to put forth a message of protest; to plant his feet and demand recognition for who they are and not who society forces them to be, but Keo codifies his biography into a savvy recognition of his repression.

This reading is reinforced when we consider that Keo is Gay. While it doesn't seem the most important aspect of Keo's projected alienation, at least not in the context of this installation, he references another level of repression in a covert photographic image in which he blocks the view of his genitals with his hands, his entire body, of course, covered in white.

Keo has made clear that the overabundance of shredded paper makes reference to the relentless documentation of personal history in the United States. How many bureaucratic forms has Keo filled out in his journey thus far? We are all burdened with such baggage, and it is now a largely digital repository of personal data, but Keo’s paper trail is undoubtedly greater than that of most law-abiding native-born citizens.

As personal as the entire project is, it also strikes a universal chord for all immigrants who come to America as People of Color and/or people for whom English is a second language, and perhaps many others who might not as easily match those descriptions. This positions Confront as one of the more important exhibits of the moment, a commentary that speaks to the chaos in American society, the worth and importance of the immigrant in that chaos, and the very core value of diversity that lies at the heart of the United States of America.

Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.