Logo FINALThe Alliance for the Arts will host its annual fundraiser Order/Chaos: An Evening on Edge on Saturday, November 12, 2016 on the Alliance campus. Join us for this unique event and explore the ever-present dichotomy between order and chaos. Event proceeds provide opportunities for children to participate in the arts, expanding collaborations with social service organizations to utilize art therapy, and enhancing the quality of life in southwest Florida.

Artists will help to create a sensory experience to entice and delight attendees by exploring the concepts of order and chaos as interpreted by performance, visual, musical and culinary artists. Interactive art exhibits will provide an opportunity to step inside the worlds of order and chaos and play on the razor-thin edge between the two.

The area’s top chefs will be on hand to provide tastings of their culinary creations and a specialty cocktail will twist the theme to its extreme. Live and silent auctions will provide opportunity to bid on exciting experiences and thrilling adventures. The night concludes in the Alliance lounge with dancing and a live performance by local rock stars Strange Arrangement. Come prepared to be unprepared.

Tickets for the VIP Experience are $200 and include access to a VIP pre-party, exclusive preview of auction packages and access to VIP concert seating with cocktail service. Doors for VIP open at 6:30PM. Main event tickets are $125 and include open bar, live entertainment, silent and live auctions, and tastings from the best chefs in town. The main event begins at 7PM.

Culinary sponsors include Mermaid Garden Cafe, Prawnbroker Restaurant & Fish Market, and Pyro’s Creations. Event sponsors include Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre and Boost Creative. Media sponsors include Gulfshore Life and Florida Weekly.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available. For more information, call (239) 939-2787 or visit ArtInLee.org/orderchaos.

GunShow with nameTheatre Conspiracy presents THE GUN SHOW, a new solo play by E.M. Lewis. The show received rave reviews and played extended runs in its two previous productions in Chicago and Los Angeles. In it, Miguel Cintron plays a surprising character who lays bare Americans’ complicated, contradictory feelings about guns, with a unique perspective that upends common criticisms from the opposite poles of the American political spectrum. THE GUN SHOW previews September 7 and opens September 8 at the Foulds Theatre in the Alliance for the Arts. Theatre Conspiracy’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Taylor will direct the show.

In five true stories that range from humorous and touching to harrowing and heartbreaking, THE GUN SHOW makes audiences on either side of the aisle realize there are no easy answers in the gun debate. “We have a problem with guns in America,” Lewis writes. “The problem is, we really, really like them.” In stories ranging from a nostalgic look at growing up in rural Oregon — where having a gun around the house is as normal as anything and learning to shoot is a familiar rite of passage — to life-changing episodes of gun violence, Lewis offers an unflinching look down the barrel at the America we live in today.

“Human, bold, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always honest.” —New City Stage

Performances are September 7 – 17, on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays at 8PM with one Sunday matinee at 2PM on September 18.

Tickets for the Preview performance on Thursday, September 7 are $15. All other performances are $24 or $11 for students with proper ID. Thursday nights are “buy one get one half off.” For tickets, call 239-936-3239 or purchase online at www.theatreconspiracy.org. Season subscription packages are also available. Buy 8 shows for $144 ($18 per ticket), 7 shows for $133 ($19 per ticket), 6 shows for $120 ($20 a ticket), or 5 shows for $110 ($22 per ticket).

Born and raised in rural Oregon where, for many, gun ownership is a treasured right, E.M. Lewis now lives on her family’s Pacific Northwest farm after spending some years in Los Angeles and New Jersey. She has developed work at a number of locales including PlayFest Santa Barbara in California and Emerging Artists Theater in New York City. Her plays include Song of Extinction, Infinite Black Suitcase, True Story, Heads, Reading to Vegetables and Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday. She received the 2012 Fellowship in Playwriting from the New Jersey Council for the Arts and the 2010‐2011 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Heads won the 2008 Primus Prize from the American Theater Critics Association.

Carl Schwartz Cypress SunrisePaintings by Carl E. Schwartz will be featured in two galleries at the Alliance for the Arts in September, with an opening reception on Friday, September 9 from 5-7PM. Schwartz taught figure drawing and painting in Chicago at the North Shore Art League for almost 30 years and in 1984 moved to Florida permanently. In 1999 he returned to teaching for another 14 years at Florida Gulf Coast University where he taught drawing and painting and enjoyed the satisfaction of watching the growth of young artists. He passed away on September 21, 2014.

Carl Schwartz Rising Koi with LiliesMr. Schwartz was born in Detroit and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago where he earned a BFA degree. His impressive biography lists awards, such as the Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago, juried and invitational exhibitions like Art Across America, sponsored by Mead Corporation, and one and two person shows at Illinois State Museum and the Art Institute S&R Gallery in Chicago to name a few. His works are on display in more than 25 colleges and universities throughout the country, including Harvard, Ball State, Loyola, Michigan State, Nevada, Minnesota, Chicago and others. He has many major placements in permanent collections throughout the United States, such as The Smithsonian Institution, Kemper Insurance, AT&T, Sears, Delta Airlines, Beatrice Foods, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and abroad, including the British Museum in London. He worked with and was published by both Reader’s Digest and Playboy Magazine. He can be found in Who’s Who, Who’s Who in the Midwest as well as Who’s Who in American Art.

Mr. Schwartz was an assiduous student of light. He isolated and painted the pattern and forms he saw.
The influence of abstract expressionism hangs just below the surface of his work. Seen in detail, it is completely abstract. Mr. Schwartz created tight shapes under a controlled technique. Using these controlled forms he produced what we perceive as “real”. The subject of the painting becomes secondary to the form. Mr. Schwartz crystallized the act of seeing for us, focusing our attention where his passion and vision lead him. The strength and energy of his work was created by sheer hard work combined with his ability to break down shape and form to its smallest components.

Mr. Schwartz extended his interested beyond the canvas. He created a number of gardens, which were written up in various magazines. His own water garden contains several Koi ponds complete with water lilies, some of which he propagated himself. He also filled his garden with unusual plant life not often seen elsewhere. It provided a perfect setting and was the subject of many of his watercolors and acrylic paintings.

Mr. Schwartz was a realist whose work shows an influence of both abstract expressionism and cubism. An interest in the effects of light assumed a central importance in his work. He often stated…
“I am a painter of light. I’m intrigued and fascinated with form. To me, there are two worlds…the one we live in… and the one that I create. Painting is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover both of these worlds.”

The exhibit is sponsored by The Law Offices of Thomas C. Chase, P.A.