Butler Banner

Winter 2025 offers many opportunities to view and experience art at the Central Arkansas Library System through exhibitions, events, and workshops!

Exhibitions

From the Vault: A Survey of the CALS Art Collection will be on display throughout the spring, with some additions to mark Black History Month.

The art of sending and receiving Christmas cards in the mail has dwindled, though it has not entirely vanished. I remember, when I was young, my parents signing cards and putting them in envelopes, addressing and stamping them, and taking them to the post office for delivery. The cards they received were displayed on the living room wall through the holiday season.

Recently, I was standing outside an abandoned Presbyterian church in rural Clark County thinking about the collapse of civilizations. Or rather, thinking about how they don’t collapse.

I’d come to this spot two years previously with the artist V. L. Cox, who had secured permission from the Presbyterian synod to remove the stained-glass windows from the church (or what remained of the windows,

Katherine Phillips Mitchell was born into a home of hope. Although her parents Clem Phillips and Parthenia Nash Phillips lived in the area of Little Rock known as Hanger Hill, they originally came from Hope in Hempstead County. Her siblings Clemmie, Charles, Doris, and Delois were raised with the value of hope educationally,

While reviewing the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) usage stats for the month of September, I noticed a huge influx of web visits from South Korea: 8,208 to be exact. (Monthly visits to the CALS EOA from South Korea usually total around 100.) Some of our most common visiting nations include Australia (1,263 in September),

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then we would need millions of words to describe the contents of the CALS Butler Center’s Pulaski County Photograph Collection (BC.PHO.2.A). This collection was started when the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System was founded in 1997, and it now includes more than 3,100 items.

In March 2024, the Arkansas Humanities Council hosted the inaugural Next Gen conference to connect emerging humanities professionals with careers in the field. During the conference, gifted and talented (GT) educators Brenda Rush (Malvern School District) and Laura West (Hot Springs School District) gave a presentation on place-based learning. This educational technique goes outside the classroom to allow students to learn new skills specific to a location.

The Central Arkansas Library System hosted another successful genealogy workshop on October 5, 2024, in the CALS Ron Robinson Theater. This year, it was in-person only, so participants got to meet each other, enjoy a free lunch, and spend the day immersed in all things genealogy. The sessions were recorded, though, for others to enjoy and learn from,

The online Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA), a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, has launched two major interactive features aimed at making Arkansas history more fun and accessible, as well as some other enhancements, such as improved browsing and a day-by-day history calendar.

“Earlier this year,” said EOA editor Guy Lancaster,

Spiritualism has a long history in Arkansas, intertwined with the profound impacts of the Civil War and subsequent societal changes. Originating as a belief system that suggests the dead can communicate with the living, spiritualism gained traction in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

The devastation of the Civil War—with Arkansas losing over 10,000 residents in the fighting—created a landscape ripe for spiritualist practices.