Culture Flash!

• Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American art at the Blanton Museum of Art, has been named chief curator of the Sixth Mercosul Biennial, the largest art event of the Southern Cone of Latin America and considered one of the most important contemporary art events in South America. Pérez-Barreiro will keep his post at the Blanton but will spend significant chunks of the coming year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, dealing with the biennial, which is scheduled for September through December 2007. The theme of the show will be "The Third Bank of the River," the title of a short story by Brazilian author José Guimarães Rosa that Pérez-Barreiro appropriated to allude to art's ability to create a third alternative between two opposed concepts (left/right, abstract/figurative, American/Latin American, etc). For more information, visit www.bienalmercosul.art.br.

• Writer/actor/stand-up comic/solo show master Rob Nash is goin' back to Houston, Houston, Houston, as the old song goes, but only long enough to serve as guest teaching artist for the Apprentice Conservatory Training program at Theatre Under the Stars. The Bayou City native and alumnus of TUTS' Humphreys School of Musical Theatre won't just be tutoring the next generation of Nashes, however; in ACT@TUTS' production of Disney's Aladdin Jr., he'll – shades of Robin Williams! – take a turn as the Genie. The show runs Friday and Saturday, Sept. 15-16, at the Hobby Center's Zilkha Hall, 800 Bagby at Walker. For more information, visit www.tuts.com.

• The Long Center for the Performing Arts is $106,000 closer to its $77 million goal. The performing-arts center, currently under construction at the corner of Riverside and South First, received its latest six-figure prize from Tokyo Electron U.S. Holdings, and it's the corporation's largest donation to a U.S. nonprofit this year.ÊThe Long Center is slated to open in March 2008.

• KMFA-FM Classical 89.5 has been awarded its first-ever Community Service Grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The classical station is expected to receive $116,000, which represents the largest single grant it has ever received.

• Leander quilter Naomi S. Adams has a quilt in a touring exhibition that seeks to raise awareness of Alzheimer's disease and fund research for a cure. "Alzheimer's: Forgetting Piece by Piece" consists of 52 art quilts that respond to or interpret the disease. Adams, who works for the Williamson County Crisis Center, had her work Lost Moments accepted for the show, which will travel the U.S. for the next three years. For more information, visit www.alzquilts.org.

• Update: In March, "Culture Flash" reported on Amber Kappes being selected as a semifinalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Kappes' painting Shaela and Elliott was among 100 works selected from a field of 4,000 entries nationwide. Well, the painting made the finals and is one of 51 works on display in the newly renovated and just reopened National Gallery through Feb. 19, 2007. Kappes graduated from UT-Permian Basin in Odessa. For more information, visit www.portraitcompetition.si.edu/index.html.