Culture Flash!

• Art in Public Places officially unveils the new work "Elevated Prairie" on Sunday, May 15, 4-6pm, at the Central/East Austin Police Substation and Forensics Lab, 812 Springdale. Artists Murray Legge, Deborah Lewis, and Andrea Legge will give a guided tour of their work, which features weathered steel planters full of prairie grasses and wildflowers and bermed turf grasses that form a giant fingerprint shape across the lawn. For more information, call 974-9312.

• Rude Mechanicals are headed to scenic Blue Lake, Calif., on the Pacific Coast to present Cherrywood in the Ensemble Theatre Festival June 21-26. ETF features 14 companies considered the best of ensemble practitioners from across the country,

• Meanwhile, over on the Right Coast, Austin companies will once again be well represented in the NYC Fringe Festival, that Mother of All American Fringes. Sharing a little touch of Austin with the Big Apple this August will be a chick & a dude productions, with its B. Iden Payne Award-winning mob drama HIT; Physical Plant Theater, with its unnerving slapstick fable Not Clown; Refraction Arts Project, with its inventive reinvented myth The Philomel Project: we are all transformed to birds; and Steve Barney, with his hit FronteraFest monologue "Wade."