IF YOU GO

- Durham Arts Council Building, 120 Morris St.: "Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-1968," Durham Art Guild, through Oct. 18.

- "Annemarie Gugelmann: Paintings," Allenton Gallery; "Brad Williams: Paintings," Semans Gallery, through Nov. 1.

Arts Council galleries are open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 6 p.m. on Sundays. Art Guild gallery hours are Monday-Saturday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

For the past month the Durham Art Guild in partnership with Duke's John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies has been celebrating Sun Ra, a jazz musician (1914-1993) who began life in Birmingham, Ala., as Herman Poole Blount. We know from biographical notes that he was a musician as a youngster, playing the piano and leading an orchestra in high school and college.

By 1945 he had moved to Chicago. There, he created a "space trio" with Tommy Hunter on the drums and Pat Patrick on the saxophone. Ultimately, the trio evolved into a musical group signified as Arkestra, which blended the sounds of cow bells, Chinese gongs, burning sax figures and piano lines straight out of church music. All this morphed into swing born in the cosmos.

His shtick (or entertainment gimmick) was to claim he was from Saturn. His persona was as a jazz visionary and prognosticator of future times, mixing space and the Bible with the bells and gongs. He and his musicians dressed in costumes that spoke of otherworldly ideas relying heavily on Egyptian mythology. By the 1960s his music was hard bop big band, with exotic touches. He added multiple electronic instruments, including the famous Moog synthesizer. Shades of John Cage (1912-1992) cast their shadows over Ra's work, not unlike other musical groups of that era.

Filled with memorabilia, the exhibit includes ideas for record covers, the wood block plates and original designs for recording sleeves, actual records and 45s and the written contracts with several recording companies. Sun Ra's music was part of an underground movement; you had to be in Chicago and really tuned in to know about him.

The exhibit, however, is a disappointment because there is no sound. A master of sound is nothing without it; at least one interactive station where the visitor could hear a few bars of the master's music would have changed this plodding chronology into a smart, vibrant show.

The Allenton Gallery in the entrance lobby of the Arts Council Building is hosting Annemarie Gugelmann's paintings of Durham. Gugelmann's five large oils are the result of a 2009 Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council and there could be no greater proof of the worthiness of such projects than the work on the walls. The artist chose well-known downtown sites like the Durham Performing Arts Center, the top floor of Golden Belt, Dunstan Street duplexes and part of a block on Main Street to visualize.

In each, she picks an iconic segment, such as the edge of teh DPAC facade that slants toward the open sky, or a view through some of the giant beams on Golden Belt's fourth floor, or the part of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park where the American Tobacco water tower hovers over the bleachers. Her juicy colors range from hues of brown for her bit of Main Street to blocks of blues, yellows, whites and brown rectangles for DPAC's glass walls.

In her gallery information, Gugelmann talks about recording a place carefully with photographs before she takes up the challenge of painting that spot. She writes, "I actually prefer bad pictures (blurry, discolored, etc.) because this gives me more room to become creative while painting." Her surfaces are shimmery, seen in the reflection of a glaring sun, or through a fine mist of rain or a blurry photograph.

Gugelmann's paintings are upbeat; they report a renaissance. On the other hand, Brad Williams' circus paintings in the Semans Gallery are about cruelty, rebellion, the Apocalypse; the victim, an elephant, is the stand-in for every man.

For example, in "Divertissement" the painter uses thick clumps of oil paint to make his animals come alive. Equally thick and soft is the ground below animated with messy swipes of painted color. In this picture, the animal rears off his little stool, trumpeting a sound of anguish from the swirling red circle of his giant mouth.

In "Stampede" two black elephants lead the way as their herd swells toward the viewer; in the background globs of paint eat through the stripes of a disappearing tent. In "The Greatest Show on Earth," circles of agitated thick swipes of color glow in a black abyss. A dozen elephants stand on the edge of one. An elephant tries to cross a trapeze in another and in a dark corner of this huge maelstrom a pachyderm sits under a burning tree. Above it all, a small plane looks for a landing site.

While I savored the artist's beautiful painting style, I looked with dread at his message. His elephants and their message of doom reminded me of Sara Gruen's best selling book, "Water for Elephants," whose protagonist, the one elephant in a small traveling circus, takes advantage of an emergency and becomes a free agent and doom changes to the dawn of a new life.

Blue Greenberg's column appears each week in Entertainment and More. She can be reached at blueg@bellsouth.net or by writing her in c/o The Herald-Sun, P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702.