When the River Cities' Reader profiled Figge Art Museum Executive Director Sean O'Harrow in March 2008, he was, by virtue of having just seven months on the job, mostly talk. There wasn't much of a track record to cite, but he spoke with passion about enhancing the Figge's educational and community missions.

Ten months later, O'Harrow seems poised to deliver on many of his promises.

For example, a March exhibit of Michaelangelo sculptures will be the first time those have been seen outside of Florence, Italy, O'Harrow said.

More importantly, those Michaelangelo sculptures - newly cast in bronze from the fragile originals, which were scanned with a laser - can be touched, and O'Harrow is working to bring in sight-impaired people to feel them.

"Art museums normally ignore these communities," O'Harrow said in an interview Monday. "My view is: Bring everyone in sometime, somehow, for some reason. ...

"I'm really keen to have people experience things in different ways," he added. "No one living has ever been able to touch a Michaelangelo work."

The announcement on Friday that the Figge would be housing most of the University of Iowa Museum of Art collection (nearly all of which is being stored in Chicago following the summer flood in Iowa City) was further confirmation that O'Harrow is serious about education.

On the 1996 benefit album Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation, the songs of Vic Chesnutt were covered by everybody from Madonna to R.E.M. to the Smashing Pumpkins to the Indigo Girls. Early in his career, the singer/songwriter was championed by Michael Stipe, who produced Chesnutt's first two records, released in 1990 and 1991. Early in his career, PBS aired a documentary titled Speed Racer about his life. He had a small part in Sling Blade.

He has collaborated with a diverse slate of artists from Widespread Panic to jazz guitarist Bill Frisell to the Cowboy Junkies to members of Fugazi and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Chesnutt's latest partnership is with the psychedelic-pop group Elf Power, part of the Georgia collective that spawned The Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. Chesnutt and Elf Power will be among the performers at a March 18 R.E.M. tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, at which they'll perform "Everybody Hurts."

I start with the résumé because even if you've heard Chesnutt's name, he's not exactly famous. He has an immense reputation but a relatively small audience.

On record, Rodriguez has an assured, slightly too-knowing voice, pleading to a drug dealer - "Won't you bring back all those colors to my dreams" - over a wistful, wheezing musical backdrop that gives way to agitation. The song is "Sugar Man" (available for free download at LightInTheAttic.net/releases/rodriguez/sugar_man.mp3), from the album Cold Fact, and based on them, one gets an image of a street-wise documenter of the dark sides of urban society: "The ladies on my street / Aren't there for their health."

On the phone, though, he's soft-spoken, apologizing that he needs to have questions repeated because of his phone and his hearing.

That disconnect makes sense when one knows that the gulf between Cold Fact and Americans' awareness of it is nearly four decades. Rodriguez released the record in 1970, and its follow-up in 1971, but the apathy that greeted them forced him to give up on music.

"I thought we were going to hit," he said last week. "Didn't happen, though."

In the second weekend of January, we already have our first perfect score of 2009: for Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.