AUSTIN ARTS HALL OF FAME

Austin Arts Hall of Fame honors more than just the artists

From comedy to architecture, music directors to art patrons, this year's inductees to the Ausitn Arts Hall of Fame made the city a more artful place

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Without them, Austin's cultural landscape wouldn't be as artful as it is. Patrons, creators, managers, place makers — this year's inductees to the Austin Arts Hall of Fame represent the varied skill sets needed to build and sustain a vital, creative community. On June 2, the new Hall of Fame honorees will be recognized at the annual Austin Critics Table Awards. The event is free and open to all and starts at 7 p.m. at the Cap City Comedy Club, 8120 Research Blvd.

Margie Coyle

Owner, Cap City Comedy Club

As Mark Twain once said, "The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."

That would make Margie Coyle one powerful woman.

The native of Garland didn't plan on a career in show business. She started working at Cap City as a waitress in 1987 as a way to pay the bills while she got a degree in finance at the University of Texas. But she never left. By 2003, Coyle and her husband, Alex, along with two other couples, purchased the club, putting Coyle in charge of the day-to-day management.

Perhaps all the years of rubbing elbows with stand-up comedians of all stripes has sharpened Coyle's humor.

"As long as people need places to go on dates, there will always be comedy clubs," she deadpans. "Comedy is essential, but it's a hard art form. You have to have a lot of audacity to get up on the stage and make strangers laugh."

Coyle and Cap City have been essential in nurturing Austin's local comedic talent, especially through the annual "Funniest Person in Austin" contest, now more than two decades old and an event that regularly attracts talent managers and other national comedy business professionals to Austin in search of new talent. "People look at what we're doing here and know there's talent," Coyle says.

Importantly, Coyle has kept a mix of shows dedicated to up-and-coming Austin comics along with consistently brought in an impressive roster of national-level talent year after year. "We have a reputation as a city with smart, diversified audiences," Coyle says. "It's not hard to get to comics interested in playing here."

For the past several years, Coyle has also opened up Cap City Comedy Club for free to the arts community for the annual Austin Critics' Table Awards ceremony.

It's like Coyle said: Comedy, like all the arts, is essential.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Tina Marsh

Composer, singer, arts leader

There is something quintessentially Austin about Tina Marsh's music. It's informed by the environment and is often performed either out of doors — Laguna Gloria is a favored spot — or in site-specific buildings, all bathed in local color. Although often labeled avant-garde jazz, her music is genre-busting, yoking influences and instruments from electronica to world roots. Marsh is the ultimate collaborator, another Austin trait, working closely with longtimers and newcomers in the Creative Opportunity Orchestra, or with visual and performing artists on some of the city's most memorable projects. And in a city that values originality, CO2 has premiered more than 100 completely fresh compositions, many by Marsh herself.

Marsh's induction into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame reflects not only these attributes, but her several decades of cultural leadership. Many will know her best from contributions to Hall of Famer Sally Jacques' epic and ethereal dances in warehouses, empty pools, shells of partially completed buildings and other visually distinctive locations. Her haunting soprano has graced many recordings and concerts, including Alex Coke's jazz suite "Iraqnophobia."

Marsh contributes regularly to the Austin social scene, appearing at benefits and lending her artistry to worthy causes. Already inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame, Marsh founded the New Jazz Series and sometimes broke away from her big-band work to produce minimalist albums such as "Inside the Breaking: Volume I." She has performed with such greats as Carla Bley, Hamiet Bluiett, Vinny Golia, Dennis González, Billy Hart, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Swallow and Kenny Wheeler.

If Austin had an official soundtrack, Marsh's voice could be heard in the harmony.

— Michael Barnes

Stan Haas

Nelson Partners Inc.; design architect

for the Long Center for the Performing Arts

Others might not have stuck around so long to see a project through — or been willing to do it on a comparative dime.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, architect Stan Haas teamed up with a group of major arts supporters who were beginning to take a look at how the 1950s Palmer Auditorium might be reworked into a new performing arts centers for Austin's growing onstage presenters.

Besides having a fondness for midcentury modern architecture, Haas, a native of Temple, had a growing penchant for doing more with less — for finding ways to take existing buildings and repurpose them to meet contemporary needs. Why demolish what was already there? Why add to landfills? Why not reuse and make something wonderful while you're at it? Hass has modestly called his thrifty but forward-thinking approach to sustainable architecture just good old common sense.

Haas stuck with the Long Center over the nearly decade and a half it took to realize the project. Through the ups and down that saw the plans reconfigured in many ways, through his donation of hundreds of hours of professional services, Haas has given Austin a wholly original, funky and cool performing arts center for a wholly original arts community.

— J.C.v.R.

Don Howell

Arts patron

For most readers, the least familiar name on this year's Austin Arts Hall of Fame list will be Don Howell. Yet an Austin theatergoer could not pick up a printed program during the 1990s without spotting Howell's name among the patrons gratefully acknowledged. That's because the retired high-school drama teacher from Alice made it his mission to encourage the youthful theater companies that were then springing up in Austin like wildflowers.

Howell made small cash donations, but his greater service was nurturing and nudging artists such as Vicky Boone, Steve Moore, Bonnie Cullum, Jennifer Haley, Norman Blumensaadt, and Robi and Michelle Polgar as they first spread their wings. While Austin theater was making its reputation nationally as a place for creative innovation, Howell was there to guide the grass-roots troupes that put the performances on the stage, often in lightly renovated warehouses.

A producer and dramaturge as well, Howell volunteered regularly for Austin Circle of Theaters, transformed during the early 1990s under Ann Ciccolella into an essential arts advocacy organization.

Before teaching in Alice, he worked for the pioneering director Margo Jones at her Dallas theater, and studied and toured with founder Paul Baker. He studied with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and later worked alongside Nina Vance at Houston's Alley Theatre.

Howell was an active witness to three profound transformations of Texas and American theater: the regional theater movement of the 1940s through 1960s; the near-universal postwar proliferation of high-school drama through the University Interscholastic League; and the rise of the warehouse theater movement in Austin during the 1990s and early 21st century.

— M.B.

Craig Hella Johnson

Founder and artistic director, Conspirare

Singing together: It would seem like the most fundamental of human activities — a group pursuit as old as the hills and as basic to human society as conversing.

Craig Hella Johnson clearly believes so.

In 1991, the Minnesota native founded the professional chorus now known as Conspirare. Perhaps unique is Johnson's vision of a community of voices that give expression to a wide and democratic range of musical styles. Whether resurrecting overlooked but wonderful music of the past, presenting familiar choral masterpieces, commissioning new work from rising talents or surprising with Johnson's own brilliant, fresh choral arrangements of, say, a Dolly Parton song or a traditional hymn, Conspirare has showered audiences with its luminous harmony of voices.

Steadfastly, Johnson has built Conspirare into an internationally recognized musical group with a huge, loyal and ever-growing audience. And he has built a solid, professional organization to support the artistry. In 2007, Conspirare had the distinction of receiving a Grammy nomination, the first of any Austin classical music group to be so honored. Perhaps fittingly, that nomination was for Conspirare's CD "Requiem," a compendium of honorific songs that span the whole gamut of musical styles.

Everyone's song is welcomed by Johnson.

— J.C.v.R.

Joe R. and Teresa Long

Arts patrons

In the more than five decades that Joe R. and Teresa Long have called Austin home, and among the many worthy efforts they have been fundamental in supporting, perhaps no other will have such a lasting impact on the entire community as the new $77 million Long Center for the Performing Arts.

Their philanthropy has been spread over many sectors of the arts and education: among other organizations, the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Austin Lyric Opera and several facets of the University of Texas, including the Blanton Museum of Art. But in 1999, when the Longs made a $20 million contribution toward Austin's first civic performing arts center, their largesse brought an important endorsement to the project. Their gift still stands as the largest private donation ever made to the arts in Austin.

"Everything we do, we do together," Teresa Lozano Long once told an American-Statesman reporter.

Perhaps more importantly, they take no ownership in the city-defining arts venue that bears their name.

"We conceived of it as a community project," Joe Long said in January as the building received final touches for opening. "It belongs to the people of Austin. And I hope everyone enjoys it."

— J.C.v.R.