Small Works
“Small Works on Paper,” the Arkansas Arts Council’s annual traveling exhibit of works no larger than 18-by-24 inches, opens Monday at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, 701 S. Main St., Pine Bluff. The center will hold an opening reception and artist’s talk, 5-7 p.m. Thursday. Admission to both is free.
The exhibit will be on display through Jan. 26, 10 a.m-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.
The 2026 edition of the show, now in its 39th year, features art by 40 Arkansas artists, chosen from more than 300 entries by juror Kelli Scott Kelley, an artist and professor of painting at Louisiana State University. Kelley chose pieces by Melissa Lashbrook of Cabot and Lisa Thorpe of Little Rock for purchase awards that will be part of the Small Works on Paper permanent collection.
The exhibit subsequently travels to Arkansas Tech University at Russellville, where it opens Feb. 2, and from there to Fort Smith, Bentonville, Batesville, North Little Rock, Stuttgart, Helena-West Helena, West Memphis and Forrest City.
For more information, including a list of this year’s artists, visit the Small Works on Paper page at arkansasheritage.com.
Photo competition
Jan. 27 is the deadline to submit photos for the South Arkansas Arts Center’s 2026 Viewfinder Photography Competition, Feb. 2-March 1 at the center, 110 E. Fifth St., El Dorado.
This year’s Sponsor’s Purchase Award theme, “America 250,” invites photographic interpretations celebrating the United States’ “250 years of freedom and the enduring spirit of patriotism within Union County,” according to a news release. The winner of the “America 250” Purchase Award will receive $250 and their work will be featured in the El Dorado Insider, which is co-sponsoring the biennial competition with the Diamond Agency.
There’s more than $1,250 in prize money on the line, including $500 for Best of Show, $250 for First Place, $150 for Second Place and $100 for Third Place. Awards will be announced at an artists’ reception, 5:30-7 p.m. Feb. 12.
Photographers may use any type of camera, and produce prints on any medium. Basic corrective editing, whether completed in a darkroom or digitally, is permitted, but not graphic manipulation. Submitted works must not have been previously shown in the Viewfinder Competition. Each photographer may submit up to two framed photographs. There’s a $10 entry fee; center members get one free entry. Find the online entry form and more details at saac-arts.org/the-viewfinder. Or call (870) 862-5474.
AMFA exhibitions
“A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time,” examining the human perception of time, opens Feb. 19 in the Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, 501 E. Ninth St., Little Rock, and kicks off the museum’s 2026 exhibition schedule.
The exhibition, up through Sept. 6, is organized by the Mid-South Cohort, an art-sharing collaboration among the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts; Birmingham Museum of Art; Fisk University Galleries; and Mississippi Museum of Art.
The exhibition is linked to two contemplative new media works in the museum’s Fine Arts Club New Media Gallery:
◼️ Finnish artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Attila’s “On Breathing,” up through May 24, a 9-minute, 45-second video showing a stately oak tree consumed by morning fog, along with the sounds of birdsong, the ebb and flow of the tides of the nearby seashore and wind rustling through the leaves; all create the illusion that the tree itself is breathing.
◼️ The U.S. premiere of “Aftermaths,” a 7-minute, 39-second video by British painter, photographer, sculptor and filmmaker Mat Collishaw, depicting sea creatures mutating, evolving and swimming through a dystopian world to vividly illustrate the price of progress and humanity’s impact on the planet, incorporating a recording of Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.” It’s on display June 6-Nov. 15.
The rest of the lineup:
◼️ May 2-Oct. 11: “Will Barnet: Seasons of Life,” in the museum’s Berta and John Baird Gallery. Pulled from an extensive selection of works on paper by Barnet (1911-2012) in the AMFA Foundation Collection, the exhibition celebrates an artist “for whom the pendulum between realism and abstraction swung profoundly,” according to a news release.
◼️ Aug. 22-April 25, 2027: “Material Nature: The Robyn and John Horn Collection,” in the Robyn and John Horn Gallery. These are works, primarily non-functional and sculptural, from the AMFA Foundation Collection that the Horns gave the museum.
◼️ Oct. 9-Jan. 10, 2027: “The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film” in the Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery. This is a look at works produced in Germany during the period of political and economic turmoil following World War I — paintings, sculptures and graphic works sit side by side with images from the era’s films, including “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), “Nosferatu” (1921) and “Metropolis” (1927).
◼️ Oct. 24-March 14, 2027: “Soviet Cinema: Mikhail Dlugach and 1920s Poster Design,” in the Berta and John Baird Gallery. Ukrainian artist Mikhail O. Dlugach (1893-1988), among poster artists in 1920s Moscow, created a new graphic design language prior to ultimate governmental suppression. The exhibition marks the recent donation to the museum by San Francisco-based collector and gallerist Martin Muller.
Museum admission is free. Visit arkmfa.org.