Little Rock notebook
Ex-exec at museum joins visitors bureau
The city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau has hired a new senior vice president of finance and administration.
Nikki Parnell, the former chief financial officer for the Museum of Discovery, has taken over the position after the former senior vice president resigned and accepted another job. Her salary is $95,000.
Parnell will be responsible for managing the bureau’s accounting, tax collections, administrative and information-technology efforts. At the Museum of Discovery she helped oversee a $9.2 million renovation.
She has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in accounting from Hendrix College, and she is a certified public accountant.
Arkansas architects to talk about work
Two Arkansas architects will discuss the evolving profession at an event Tuesday at the Arkansas Arts Center.
Marc Manack and Frank Jacobus — both assistant professors at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville — will talk about how contemporary design, technology and changing perceptions have affected the roles of architects.
“While they, like other architects, still deal with bricks and mortar, glass, steel and other traditional building elements, the two men have sought out and experimented in unexpected ways with new, non-traditional materials and techniques, employing them in the design and making of temporary as well as permanent structures, installations and objects,” a press release said.
Manack is a founding principal architect and Jacobus is a principal at SILO AR+D, an architectural, research and design collaborative with locations in Fayetteville and Cleveland.
Tuesday’s free lecture is put on by the Architecture and Design Network. A 5:30 p.m. reception will precede the 6 p.m. discussion in the Arts Center’s lecture hall at 501 E. Ninth St.
Life, legacy of rabbi to be lecture focus
This month’s Legacies and Lunch lecture will focus on the 150th anniversary of Congregation B’nai Israel.
The noon event Wednesday will feature James Moses, professor of history at Arkansas Tech University, discussing the life of Ira Sanders, who served as rabbi at Congregation B’nai Israel for 38 years.
Sanders “was a legendary champion of social justice in Arkansas and around the nation,” according to a release.
He founded the Arkansas Lighthouse for the Blind, the Arkansas Eugenics Association and the Urban League of Greater Little Rock. Sanders also was on the Central Arkansas Library System’s board of trustees for 40 years.
Moses is writing a book about Sanders, titled Like Fire Shut Up in My Bones.
The free lecture will last about an hour at the Ron Robinson Theater at 100 River Market Ave. It is presented by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, in partnership with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
Center’s fall party to spotlight 3 books
The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies will have its fall book release party Thursday.
Books will be available for purchase, and authors will speak and sign copies during the event at 6:30 p.m. in the Main Library’s Darragh Center at 100 Rock St.
Three titles will be showcased.
It’s Official! The Real Stories Behind Arkansas’s State Symbols, by David Ware, discusses the political and historical truths behind the state bird, fruit, insect and other Arkansas symbols.
A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II Arkansas, edited by Ali Welky, is about young people who lived at the Rohwer and Jerome relocation camps in Arkansas during the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It features photos, yearbooks, artwork and first-person accounts.
Arkansas Women and the Right To Vote: The Little Rock Campaigns: 1868-1920, by Bernadette Cahill, details Arkansas women who took part in the campaign for the right to vote.