Culture Flash!

• The story in the April 2 New York Times may have been all about Houston, but the photo that ran with it was all Austin. The image showed our own Margo Sawyer supervising construction of Synchronicity of Color, a major installation of hers at the Bayou City's new downtown green space, Discovery Green. The 12-acre park, opening this week, includes gardens, recreation fields, restaurants, water features, a playground, an amphitheatre, and an underground parking garage. That garage is where Synchronicity of Color will live and what it will enliven. It encompasses both the exterior walls and the interior stairwells, utilizing the artist's trademark panels of vivid color (Austin Convention Center, Whole Foods Headquarters) to create meditative spaces inside and bold, celebratory space outside. For more information, visit www.margosawyer.com/news.html.

• Poet-playwright Sharon Bridgforth has received a $9,000 National Performance Network Creation Fund Award for her work delta dandi, a co-commission by Women & Their Work in partnership with Center on Halsted and the National Performance Network. The piece combines monologues and chants by actors; music by a gospel choir, a jazz quartet, and drummers; and looped digital images on screens around the audience, in a "score" conducted by Bridgforth. For more information, visit www.sharonbridgforth.com/my-newest-work.

• UT Department of Theatre & Dance student Leanne Meyerson won first prize in the first Young Scenic Artist's Award held by The Painter's Journal, a publication for scenic artists. The set-design major was honored for her painting of the Austin skyline at day and night. She received $300 and will have her work appear in the journal's spring 2008 issue. For more information, visit http://www.paintersjournal.com/content/YoungScenicArtistsAward.aspx.

• The 2009 Texas Biennial will be accepting submissions from artists living and working in Texas starting April 16 and continuing through May 31. Artists of all medias are encouraged to submit their work for the group exhibition and the Temporary Outdoor Project, which will be funded by the city of Austin and will award budgets for complete projects ranging from $3,000 to $10,000. Details on the two components of the project, as well as all information about the call for entry process and submitting materials online, are available on the Biennial's new website, www.texasbiennial.com, due to go live Wednesday, April 16.