Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Aug 28, 2024 – With all the many wonderful activities Northeast Arkansas has to offer, many people may not have had the chance to check out Arkansas State University’s hidden gems, including the Arkansas State University Museum and the Bradbury Art Museum (BAM).

Both museums, which are free and open to the public, are located on the A-State campus and provide a variety of fun and educational opportunities.

A-State making history fun

According to the Arkansas State University website, the A-State Museum, located at 320 University Loop West in Jonesboro, serves the academic mission of the university, while providing quality programming for the people in Northeast Arkansas and the Northern Mississippi River Delta.

The museum’s Main Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and offers a variety of exhibits, activities, and events, as well as guided tours, the museum store and more.

The museum, which started in Wilson Hall (now the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University) in 1933, offers several permanent exhibits that can be found year-round, including:

• “Earthquake,” which tells the story of the New Madrid Earthquake zone.
• “A Walk Through Time” and Crowley’s Ridge Mastodon, which tells the story of some of Arkansas’s prehistoric animals as museum goers walk through 650 million years and meet in the museum’s prize mastodon “Mona.”
• “Natural History,” which features various animals from the Northeast Arkansas area, including favorites like the albino animals, waterfowl and night owls.
• “The Arkansas Frontier,” which brings the European exploration and settlement of Arkansas alive with multiple hands-on exhibits for children and engineering-based competitions that are fun for the whole family. Toddlers can even play inside a life-size replica of the 17th-century canoe dug up at Toltec Archaeological Site in central Arkansas.
• “Portals of the Soul: Ancient Peoples of Northeast Arkansas,” which is the current exhibition in the Native American Gallery. It presents the story of Arkansas’s first civilization – the Native Americans.
• “Mary Stack Gallery,” which features a sampling of objects collected by Jonesboro native Mary E. Stack, who spent much of her life serving as a dietitian in the U.S. Army. Throughout her travels, Stack collected a variety of objects from turn of the century furniture to hat pins.
• “Living Off The Land,” which is an exhibit that provides a look into the lives of early settlers with artifacts from the farming, pearl button making and timber industries as well as everyday household tools.
• “Old Town Arkansas,” which features a town square with period photographs of area main streets and several old-timey stores such as the general store, jewelry, pawn shop, mercantile, barber shop, dentist’s office, doctor’s office, print shop, optometrist office, bank, drugstore, post office and land office. Plus, you can listen to an audio tour in English or Spanish.
• “The Military Gallery,” which holds a collection of American militaries and civilian artifacts that reflect successive conflicts from the Civil War through the Vietnam War, as well as World War II German and Japanese military artifacts.
• “Rockabilly! The Northeast Arkansas Story,” which tells the stories of NEA’s Rockabilly music and artists in the 1950s.

The museum also features several other things to do including guided tours, birthday parties, the Family Reading Castle, the Tinkering Studio, the Arkansas History Children’s Art Project, the Patch Program, and Genealogy.

For more information about the Arkansas State University Museum, visit the museum’s website at astate.edu.

A-State brings the BAM

The Bradbury Art Museum, or BAM as many locals call it, is a contemporary art space on the A-State campus.

It is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment and is located at 201 Olympic Drive in Jonesboro. BAM is not open on Sundays or Mondays, between exhibitions, or when the university is closed.

Through changing exhibitions of contemporary art in all disciplines and active outreach programming, BAM invites the community to engage in meaningful artistic experiences.

It also claims to be the only art museum in Northeast Arkansas as it strives to bring contemporary art to the region that would be otherwise inaccessible to many community members.

BAM provides support for the arts within the region by providing free, accessible educational programming and extending opportunities to regional artists.  Its education program provides workshops, lectures, tours, and informational resources to its audience.

Formerly known as Bradbury Gallery, the museum was established in January of 2001 by Curt Bradbury who provided an endowment in honor of his wife, Charlotte, an alumna of A-State and a former member of the university’s Board of Trustees.

The museum is also the site of the Delta National Small Prints Exhibition, which is an annually held and nationally recognized juried print show of work by artists from the US and abroad.

The next exhibition on deck, Contemporary Classic | Revisiting and Reimagining Art History Solo Exhibitions from Benry Fauna and Chantal Lesley, will open September 12 and continue through November 20.

The INSPIRED 10 Fall 2024 Senior Exhibition will also be coming soon, as it is scheduled for December 5-17

INSPIRED is an annual, competitive exhibition offered to regional high school students, who create artwork in response to what they saw during a visit to BAM.

BAM also holds several community events such game nights, yoga, artist talks, and workshops.

For more upcoming exhibitions or events, visit Bradbury Art Museum website at bradburyartmuseum.org.