Postponed: Pryor Center Presents 'Ozark Tales and Abstractions'

Mark Jackson

UPDATE: The following event has been postponed.

The Pryor Center Presents lecture series continues with Marlon Blackwell, FAIA. Blackwell will present 'Ozark Tales and Abstractions' at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Blackwell will share stories and experiences of designing and building in the hills of Arkansas and other places in flyover country. He will demonstrate how his ideas are generated from careful observations of intersections of nature-made and culture-made conditions particular to the varied contexts he works in.  

Using examples of selected design works from his firm, Marlon Blackwell Architects, and anecdotes from his own life, he will speak to resilient design that is a marriage of details, form and place. 

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, and serves as the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the Fay Jones School or Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. Work produced in his professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architects, has received national and international recognition with significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines and more than 160 design awards.  

Marlon Blackwell Architects received the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and ranked number one in design as part of the 2016 Architect 50. In recognition of his enduring contributions to architecture theory and practice, Blackwell is the recipient of the 2020 AIA Gold Medal.  

He was also a 2019 Resident Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2018, and was selected as a United States Artists Ford Fellow in 2014. He received the E. Fay Jones Gold Medal from AIA Arkansas in 2017 and the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  

A monograph of his early work, "An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell", was published in 2005 by Princeton Architectural Press, who will also publish a new monograph titled "Radical Practice" to be released in 2021. 

The Pryor Center is located at 1 East Center Street, Suite 120, and parking is available on the Fayetteville Square.  The event is free and open to the public.  

Upcoming Pryor Center Events

• April 8 – Arkansas Stories: 'Runaway Slave from Fayetteville' at 6 p.m.
• April 9 – Indigenous Storytellers: Kalyn Barnoski (Cherokee) at 6 p.m.
• April 15 – Pryor Center Presents: 'Downward Nobility' with Brendan O'Connell at 6 p.m.
• April 22 – Pryor Center Showcase: Symphony of Northwest Arkansas at 6:30 p.m.

About The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations' recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at http://pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state's only oral and visual history program with a statewide, 75-county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.  

About the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences: The J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences the largest and most academically diverse unit on campus with three schools, 16 departments and 43 academic programs and research centers.  The college provides the core curriculum for all University of Arkansas students and is named for J. William Fulbright, former university president and longtime U.S. senator. 

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 3 percent of colleges and universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.