Family Portrait

Austin artist revives her late mother’s work and looks for lost pieces

Artist Maggie Cook Polacheck holds one of her paintings depicting country music legend Hank Williams.

Photo courtesy of Angeliska Polacheck

Forty years after Austin artist Maggie Cook Polacheck's death, her paintings, collages, and pieces of the city's countercultural past are coming out of storage for their first public exhibition. Double Eternity: A Maggie Cook Polacheck Retrospective runs August 7-9 at Blackfeather Gallery, inside the Springdale Station complex at 979 Springdale Rd., Ste. 99, in East Austin.

Curated by Polacheck's daughter, Austin writer, artist, and tarot reader Angeliska Polacheck, also known as Sister Temperance Tarot, the exhibition includes art, readings, and live music. Angeliska was seven when her mother died.

A day before the opening, the exhibition in the small gallery across from the Blackfeather vintage store was still taking shape, with people moving in and out as artwork went up. Scrapbooks filled with photographs, playbills, and other memorabilia were displayed behind glass, while a slideshow will cycle on a television with photographs of Maggie and her work.

Maggie was a painter, collage artist, silversmith, and musician, and she and Angeliska's father were among the original founders of Austin Friends of Traditional Music. Her scrapbooks document an Austin world of music and art centered around places like Armadillo World Headquarters and the Vulcan Gas Company.

She was drawn to Austin psychedelic band Shiva's Headband and taught fiddle to experimental folk musician Ralph White, later a member of the original lineup of Austin's Bad Livers. White has called Maggie "probably my greatest influence," saying she introduced him to musical sources deeper than the radio-friendly fiddle music he had known.

Maggie Cook Polacheck plays violin alongside her husband, Angeliska Polacheck’s father.Photo courtesy of Angeliska Polacheck

Two series of Maggie's collages are in the exhibition: one inspired by English Romantic poet John Keats and another unfinished series that tracks country music legend Hank Williams. Both men died young, as Maggie herself would.

Maggie felt a particular kinship with Williams. She heard his music as a child, and he died on December 31, 1952, Maggie's fifth birthday. Her interest eventually grew into a deep passion for the singer.

Maggie worked on the Williams series until two weeks before her death from cancer on August 8, 1986. She began four of a planned five collages and left detailed instructions for someone to finish them, although her family doesn't know who she expected to take on the task.

Angeliska pulled out a yellow legal pad covered in her mother's neat cursive handwriting. The notes lay out Maggie's vision, down to years in Williams' life, with recurring images of moons, clocks, roads, cactus flowers, and Williams' eyes.

Now Angeliska, herself a collage artist, plans to follow those instructions. She has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support finishing her mother's Hank Williams series.

"It's kind of like ghostwriting someone else's work," she says. "I need to inhabit her perspective in order to do them."

The family knows that some of Maggie's completed work is out there, too. The artist had gifted pieces to friends and other fans of Hank Williams. A press release explains that some of the people who accepted the gifts have since died, and they may have passed the works on to anyone. They hope that visitors to the exhibition will make a connection and point them to long-lost pieces.

The scrapbooks also preserve a version of Austin in which artists could afford an old house on Avenue G in Hyde Park, busk folk music for change, make and sell art, and still have time to create.

Some of that community remains. Austin Friends of Traditional Music is still going, Angeliska said, with longtime members playing alongside musicians in their 20s and 30s. Some will perform during the exhibition.

But a portrait hanging on the gallery wall is a reminder that time is running short. Austin artist and activist Daniel Llanes was one of Maggie's friends, and Angeliska reconnected with him while searching for people who could tell her about her mother. When Llanes died in December, Angeliska said, "it really hit me" that the people who knew Maggie were disappearing and that the project couldn't wait.

"More and more Austin gets eradicated, and people are like, 'The magic's gone,'" Angeliska says. "It's like, well, if you don't preserve it, it will be gone."

"Double Eternity" opens with a preview and book reading August 7 from 6-9 pm. The exhibition continues August 8 and 9 from noon to 9 pm, with live music on August 8. Admission is free.

visual art live music artists galleries community

Original musical brings Bollywood to the stage with 130 Austin performers

Photo courtesy of Agni Katha

Suhaani Srireddy plays Leela Rathod in Raas Leela: An East Side Story.

A massive theater production is bringing Bollywood to Austin this summer. An original twist on a classic love story, Raas Leela: An East Side Story, will play at the Long Center for one night only, August 22.

This production makes a triple historical reference, with a story about rival families that's modeled after Romeo and Juliet, and a name that plays on West Side Story, itself a modern retelling of the old classic. Though Raas Leela is a divine dance in Hindu text, this production uses it more as a theme, meaning "stories of love," creative director Rohit Ramachandran explains. The combination of references offers audiences a way in even if they aren't familiar with South Asian theater.

But the story is only part of the spectacle that audiences are in for, with 130 local performers and 20 people on the production team keeping it all together. The entire team from dancers to costume designers live in the Austin area, and although all have professional training, most have day jobs outside of performing arts.

This is the fifth and biggest production so far for local production company Agni Katha, part of the multi-disciplinary Agni Foundation for the Arts. That's really saying something, since Agni Katha is a decade old and specializes in large-scale productions.

"The best part about this is it's taking a familiar story — that's Romeo and Juliet — but putting a South Asian twist in it," says Ramachandran, "talking about how diverse perspectives and cultures can evolve the same fundamental story and add so much flavor and so much value to it."

The company also takes a distinctly multi-cultural approach, invoking the Hindi cinema industry but dipping into other cultural niches. There are nine major dance pieces, by count in a press release, showing off styles in contemporary and folk dance. It all starts with a "really lavish" Indian Ganesh Pooja procession, says Rohit Ramachandran, followed by jazz, kathak (from Northern India), bharatanatyam (from Southern India), garba (from from Gujarat), hip hop, and heels.

Performers at rehearsal for Raas Leela: An East Side Story With so many performers, the possibilities for group dances are vast.Photo courtesy of Agni Katha

"The dance actually kind of weaves into the story very organically," says Ramachandran. "We don't have a hip hop dance because because we want to put hip hop. ... It's basically [main characters] Ram and Leela on the streets finding an underground dance party and then just popping into it."

That choreography ethos — combining the work of 12 choreographers — is analogous to the whole production, which Ramachandran says exists not to present a grand view of any certain style or culture, but to get normal Austinites authentically involved in live theater.

"Here's an opportunity where we're getting local Austinites who have their day jobs and live their lives, but then we're getting them to become artists," says Ramachandran. "You can still take care of your kids. You can still have your nine to five, but if you do have that passion for art and if you want to do something, here's a platform that we've created for you."

The musical has been in the works for almost a year. Ramachandran has his own day job in tech, working at Meta with entertainment partners. He says now he's learning woodworking to help build the set, which utilizes reclaimed materials, and he'll act in the production as Arjun, Leela's brother.

"Unless we really invest time and energy to ensure that we support theater artists and live performances, I don't want it to become a figment of imagination or something that's always seen on screen," he says. He later adds, "Let's just get back to that culture of appreciating art, live theater, music. There's so much that this world has to offer, and I feel like a little, little bit of it is getting eroded with the whole digital space. [So] hopefully, we can bring it back."

Photo courtesy of Agni Katha

Suhaani Srireddy plays Leela Rathod in Raas Leela: An East Side Story.

Tickets to Raas Leela: An East Side Story (starting at $42.12) are available at my.thelongcenter.org. The show starts at 7:30 pm and has a run time of 120 minutes.

theater musicals bollywood south asian culture