PROGRESS 2025 | Future bright in Texarkana arts and entertainment

TEXARKANA — It’s been an exciting year for the arts in Texarkana, full of promise for years to come.

TRAHC ArtSpace

In February, the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council opened its new ArtSpace building, the Twin Cities’ new home of arts education.

Various artists were on hand to demonstrate how the building’s studios will be used. The facilities are for artists of all ages and skill levels, and there are multipurpose spaces available to the community. At 16,000 square feet, the building enables TRAHC to accommodate classes and artists in a long list of various mediums.

“I have been waiting for this since the day we were gifted this building. … It’s been a lot of work. It’s been a lot of vision. We’ve been looking to make this space really flexible. And now we have the doors open! We have the doors open, and people are here. People are excited about taking classes,” said Jennifer Unger, TRAHC executive director.

TRAHC received the former Offenhauser Insurance building downtown as a donation in 2023. It has two “wet” studios suitable for painting, printmaking and other potentially messy mediums. There are also a pair of “dry” studios, a ceramics studio with potter’s wheels and a kiln, and a mosaics studio.

One large room is a drop-in, hands-on maker space where technology such as 3D printers will be available to the public. Another large room will be a multipurpose area suitable for the performing arts or use as gallery space, and it will be available to rent for meetings and other events.

ArtSpace is TRAHC’s second location. The organization will still keep office and gallery space, and a gift shop, at the Regional Arts Center on West Fourth Street and Texas Boulevard.

“The Regional Arts Center is a historical building. We have to preserve it. We can’t get paint everywhere. So we’ll be able to have classes here that are messier, and we won’t have to be so careful. Like a lot of the times, we would have our kids’ classes in the basement of the RAC, because kids so messy. But now we’ll have this huge space with dedicated studios for the ceramics and the mosaics and all the different art mediums,” Chanlee Long said.

Perot Theatre

Texarkana, Texas’ historic Perot Theatre celebrated its centennial in 2024 with a full slate of popular shows.

A highlight was comedian Jay Leno’s October stand-up show in celebration of the Perot’s 100th anniversary. It was a fundraiser for needed renovations at the theater, and Leno, a noted vintage car collector, also served as grand marshal of the Four States Auto Museum’s fall car show.

In February 2025, classic vocal groups The Four Tops and The Temptations, including founding Temptation and Texarkana native Otis Williams, packed the Perot with a tandem concert of their many hits.

Before the show, Williams and Lawrence Payton Jr. of The Four Tops told the Gazette about the groups’ histories and what audiences can expect from the show.

“We see for my shows parents bring their kids as young as 6 or 7 years old. This is because they know we don’t do nothing that’s going to be harmful to the kids, degrading of women or what have you. We think ‘wholesome.’ So we always keep a clean show,” said Williams, who was born in Texarkana, Texas, and honored in 2024 with a mural downtown. He is the last surviving original member of The Temptations.

Payton — whose late father, Lawrence Sr., was a founding member of The Four Tops — said the group’s music was “the soundtrack of our lives” during the 1960s, a dynamic time in U.S. history.

“We had the civil rights thing going on. We had Vietnam going on. We had flower power going on. People were discovering themselves and each other,” he said. “Everything that embodied us as a country came through that music. So this music kind of united us in a way that we had never been united. … You could never lose that. That is just ingrained in us. It’s a part of us now, and it’s a part of the culture.”

Since the death of Abdul “Duke” Fakir at age 88 last year, The Four Tops no longer include any founding members. But Fakir wanted the group to go on, and audiences still get the full experience of seeing the act “in all its splendor,” Payton said.

Hailey Wright

Nash, Texas, native Hailey Wright gave locals something to root for as a contestant on the NBC singing competition show “The Voice.”

Wright made it through several rounds on the show before being eliminated, and she has converted her fame into regular performances at various Texarkana venues and elsewhere.

In an interview just after her first appearance on “The Voice,” Wright talked about her strategy to get noticed by the show’s judges.

“I definitely wanted to do something that may emotionally connect with the coaches, and I knew going into it that I wanted to represent classic country, so I felt like that (“Until the Next Teardrop Falls”) was like the best song that I could go with,” she told the Gazette.

It was a softball injury that led Wright to get serious about her music.

“I ended up breaking my right leg doing so, and I had received a pawn shop guitar from my parents the Christmas prior. I didn’t have anything better to do. I went home, I wasn’t getting around real well, and I picked that guitar up, I taught myself how to play, and I really just homed in on everything and took my singing a little more serious at that point,” she said.

Later, at an open mic night at Crossties in Texarkana, Arkansas, she turned heads and gained confidence.

“I didn’t want to do it. My mom and sister kind of forced me into it. … And so I go out there, and multiple people started going live on like Facebook and things like that. And before I knew it, I had booked two or three gigs that night,” she said.