For an orchestra conductor, raising the baton at the start of a concert is a tiny fraction of the job. “I’d say it’s about 5% of what we do,” says Andrew Sewell, music director for the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra.
It’s that other 95% that Kelby Schnepel and Daewon Kang are learning as graduate students at the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music — and now as the first recipients of a new conducting fellowship with the WCO.
Professor Mark H. is the newly appointed faculty artistic director of UW–Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI), home of the First Wave Hip Hop & Urban Arts Scholarship Program, OMAI announced on Wednesday.
While at the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Lesy chanced upon thousands of photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by Charles Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls.
The gallery is free of charge to attend and will remain open until March 10 at the Main Gallery and Class of 1925 Gallery located on the second floor of Memorial Union.
The trouble started with a writer on deadline. James Sweet, who goes by Jim, is a white professor of African history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former president of the American Historical Association (A.H.A.). Every month, he was tasked with writing a column for Perspectives on History, a magazine put out by the association, which is mostly read by academics. Last summer, while he was on vacation in Ghana, he was struggling to come up with a column idea, and so he started looking around for inspiration.
Production shares poignant, complex narrative of Black experience.
Joy will be in Madison just a few months after winning her first two Grammy Awards including the coveted “Best New Artist” award. Her performance will be part of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s 2022-23 Jazz Series.
Four-time Fulbright Scholar, practitioner and acting technique pedagogist, Dr. Baron Kelly is a decorated actor, director and scholar. Currently, Kelly serves as a professor in the University of Wisconsin Theatre and Drama Department and is directing and acting in August Wilson’s Fences.
“Formless” features a cohort of new performers every year and will premiere for the second time ever on at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Play Circle in the Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St.
Some 700 area high school students already have matinee tickets reserved for “Fences,” the upcoming play from the UW-Madison Department of Theatre and Drama.
Details: Puerto Rican-born Guerrero, who received her doctorate degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined the Whitney in 2017 and was most recently an associate curator.
An example of Ball’s Emancipation Group has been on display at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for decades. It has long been a source of controversy. Increasingly so.
Attracting the attention of hundreds of Madison residents and university students, the Hemsley Theater was packed on Friday night. After filing down the stairs to the underground hall, the audience settled into seats on each side of the astroturf stage, positioned like sports fans in bleachers, looking down at the players.
A longtime UW-Madison music professor and composer has received one of the nation’s premier music awards for her opera about a 17th-century female painter.
Guerrero, who holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to the Whitney from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she helped organize the 2017 exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985.”
The Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced Monday that two ProPublica projects, “Words of Conviction” and “The Night Raids,” are among five finalists for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.
The six-screen theater at Hilldale has been a part of the Wisconsin Film Festival since it opened as Sundance Cinemas 608 in 2007, and was the primary off-campus location for the festival. While the festival, produced by the UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, has several screening venues on the UW-Madison campus, such as Shannon Hall and the Union South Marquee Theatre, booking conflicts have meant that campus screenings were limited to the first four days of the festival.
The UW-Madison Dance Department presented its first of six showings of the 2023 Faculty Concert Thursday night in Lathrop Hall. The evening included a total of six works, including five by UW faculty and one from guest artist Charles O. Anderson, Chair of The Ohio State University Department of Dance. Performances continue tonight and Saturday night, and next Thursday, Feb. 16 through Saturday, Feb. 18.
In the 1990s, Debra McClutchy took her camera into Madison music venues like Club de Wash and O’Cayz Corral, gathering footage for a documentary on women musicians who rocked Madison. Next month, she’ll go to the Academy Awards, nominated for a documentary about a woman who rocked Washington, D.C., during the Watergate scandal.
“No Bears,” which had its Madison premiere at 7 p.m. Thursday as part of the UW Cinematheque, is a noticeably bleaker film than its recent predecessors, with Panahi taking a darker look not only at the state of his country but his role documenting it.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was closing in on tech rehearsals for “The Wolves” in 2020 when COVID-19 sent everyone home. Director Audrey Lauren Standish knew immediately that they would return to it.
University Theatre presents the play in the Hemsley Theatre Feb. 16-26.
Letter to the editor: Considering the very cold and snowy weather there was a very good attendance. The audience clearly appreciated both the performances by the Wisconsin Singers, UW-Madison’s Broadway caliber touring production, and Beaver Dam’s own Good Old A Capella under the direction of Mark Lefeber.
When incoming museum director Amy Gilman first saw “Emancipation Group” on display at the Chazen Museum of Art in 2017, she reacted like many visitors: She stopped in her tracks.
A pair of longtime tuba players and educators answer a WHYsconsin question about the prominence of the lowest brass instrument both around Wisconsin, and specifically in the University of Wisconsin Marching Band.
Noted: He studied journalism and environmental geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he graduated in 2009. Berens delivered his alma mater’s winter commencement address at the Kohl Center in December.
Since the UW Cinematheque film screening series reopened after shutting down during the pandemic, director Jim Healy has noticed something different about the audiences.
In an unassuming building off of West Johnson Street, sits the remains of around 750,000 animal specimens for scientific research in the UW Zoological Museum. One of five museum collections on the UW Madison campus, the collection provides hands-on research material for universities across the country.
Hitchcock is a professor of printmaking in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has lived in the Midwest for more than two decades, but he doesn’t think of it as “home.”
Bersch, who recently got his doctorate in film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the researcher for the popular film podcast “Blank Check with Griffin & David.” Since its debut in 2016, the podcast hosted by actor/comedian Griffin Newman and The Atlantic film critic David Sims has looked at the complete filmographies of directors, from the masterpieces to the misfires.
In 2016, then an assistant professor of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she launched a “social weaving project” called the Weaving Lab, by the Image Lab created by cartoonist Lynda Barry at the campus’ Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. For two summers, Fairbanks and a small team of UW students took over the Image Lab space, installing four large floor looms so that anyone could pause at a loom, think about the big questions she’d posted beside each, and weave their own contribution to the collaborative tapestries.
Harvey, in his 30s and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture, was invited by the YMCA to establish a new program in Vladivostok, Russia.
Noted: Controversy exploded in August, when the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a leading historian of the African diaspora at the University of Wisconsin, published a column in its magazine called “Is History History?,” which lamented a “trend toward presentism” and a troubling politicization of scholarship.
The study of pre-modern history, Sweet wrote, is shrinking, while scholars of all periods increasingly question whether work that doesn’t focus on “contemporary social justice issues” like race, gender and capitalism really matters. “The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media,” he argued, has encouraged “a predictable sameness” that misses the messiness and complexity of the past.
Noted: In the episode, first airing Jan. 20, Brown tastes “sophisticated Wisconsin cheeses,” is a judge in a mustard-tasting contest and learns about the University of Wisconsin, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed First Unitarian Society meeting house, her first supper club (Tornado Club Steak House) and the joys of curling and its Madison roots — the latter with help from Olympian Becca Hamilton, according to publicity material on the episode.
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
On the evening of July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.
It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.
Growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in a predominantly white community, Beth Nguyen began grappling with her identity at an early age.
At 8 months old, she and her family fled Vietnam by ship after the fall of Saigon, eventually immigrating to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen detailed that journey, her coming of age and her longing to fit in as an American in her award-winning debut memoir “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” published in 2007.
Now an English and Asian American studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nguyen teaches others how to shape their own thoughts and experiences into meaningful stories. “Find that perspective,” she encourages them. “Meld into it. Use it.”
With the fall semester drawn to a close and a new year on the horizon, University of Wisconsin-Madison professors in departments ranging from math to English are reflecting on their favorite reads of the year.
They shared with the Cap Times the best books of 2022 — a diverse array of topics and genres, including social justice, animal studies and Slavic science fiction.
Noted: The Wisconsin First Nations website continues to be an educational favorite as well. PBS Wisconsin Education created the site in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education as an important space for educators to access authentic educational videos, lesson plans and learning tools.
This year was another big year for Meet the Lab, a digital collection of middle school learning resources developed in collaboration with research labs on the UW-Madison campus. Two new labs joined the lineup, showcasing the many topics and identities within scientific communities. Visual Communicators: Superpowered by Color explores how to use visual features to make sense of something through the Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab. They research human reactions to messages made with visual elements like color, shape and line. Learn why their research matters in a real-life mapmaking example.
In 2018, students called on UW-Madison to remove the name of Fredric March – a UW alum and one of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars in the 1930s and 40s – from a theater in Memorial Union.
That came after a UW-Madison study, commissioned in the wake of the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, examined the history of student organizations in the 1920s.
The department hosted its annual holiday sale, featuring plenty of great presents for art lovers. All available pieces were made by UW art students.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student from Wausau will be the first nuclear engineer to compete in the Miss America contest Dec. 15. Grace Stanke, who was crowned Miss Wisconsin in June, is using her platform to advocate for nuclear energy while showing women they can succeed in male-dominated industries.
Taught by Ariel (AJ) Juarez, the class allows students to work on the building blocks of the dance style, such as house — a freestyle dance method that evolved from the underground music scenes in Chicago and New York City — and popping, which involves creating a jerking effect by contracting and relaxing one’s muscles.
New York Times movie critics say the Black Panther films have underlying messages about the politics of colonization and the African diaspora. We hear from Ramzi Faraz, a UW-Madison English professor and author, about how political movements influence comics and the ways characters shape identity.
After majoring in interior design in the early 1960s at the University of Washington, a foundation for his collecting aesthetic and artistic vision, Chihuly enrolled in the country’s first glass program at the University of Wisconsin, where he also studied sculpture. Incorporating glass into tapestries to create textile and glass curtains soon gave way to his overriding interest in glassblowing.
A fair number of famous musicians have called Wisconsin home. Les Paul. Al Jarreau. Steve Miller. Justin Vernon.
Now, there’s Yung Gravy.
Matthew Hauri didn’t actually grow up in Wisconsin; he was born in Rochester, Minn. But the now 26-year-old was a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when he uploaded his first Yung Gravy EP to SoundCloud in 2016. A year later, he signed a deal with Universal Music Group’s Republic Records (the label behind Taylor Swift, the Weeknd and other A-listers), before graduating in December 2017.
30-member show choir receives standing ovation for fantastic performance Saturday night.
An anti-war student activist at UW-Madison became a union organizer on Milwaukee area factory floors in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now a retired lawyer and author of “Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War,” Jon Melrod finds common cause with the workers’ rights movement of today.
Noted: My mother moved to Madison from Chicago just over 50 years ago to pursue a college degree and provide a brighter future for my sister and me. The Gee family now consists of three generations of University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates. The university, and a small but thriving community of Black UW alumni, offered opportunities, resources and friendships that allowed us to create lives of unlimited promise, rooted in Black excellence and Black culture.
Noted: Sneha, the narrator and protagonist, is a young Indian immigrant and University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who comes to work in Milwaukee in 2013. She’s a low-level contract consultant doing dehumanizing work at a corporation. Every boss encounter is fraught, because she’d like to be sponsored for permanent residency in the United States.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Gender and Women’s Studies Professor Sami Schalk recently released her second book “Black Disability Politics.” The book was designed to bridge a gap between Black activism and disability activism because, as a disability activist, Schalk said the Black perspective is often neglected or not seen in the disability studies field.
Artists Sanford Biggers, MASK Consortium and Wildcat Ebony Brown of the Wide Awakes made their debut at the Chazen Museum of Art on Thursday, introducing the “re:mancipation” project.
Unfolding like a political thriller, American Experience: Taken Hostage is a riveting four-hour, two-part documentary film about the Iran hostage crisis, when 52 American diplomats, Marines and civilians were taken hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.
Ahead of its premiere, PBS Wisconsin spoke with writer, producer, director and University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Robert Stone about the film.
The potential for adults returning to school to reach goals of obtaining degrees and knowledge is often most affected by external factors that can make everyday life and returning to academics a difficult balance. The UW Odyssey Project is a remedy to that problem, and over their 20 years working to bring adults to higher education, they have gone the extra mile every time.
The Odyssey Project started in 2002 and quickly started changing lives. Acting as an avenue for adults to return to higher education through the resources and knowledge that run throughout UW-Madison has allowed the Odyssey Project to serve a plethora of people each year to achieve their academic, career, and personal goals. A celebration at the UW-Memorial Union was only fitting.
It’s Homecoming Week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Badger Band is getting ready for its annual parade performance.
News 3 Now photojournalist Sydney Martin caught up with the band as they ran through one of their final practices before the event.
Jennifer Angus is a professor of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. About 22 years ago, she moved to the city, bringing with her a passion for insects and art.
“I got into it when I was doing research in northern Thailand on tribal minority dress, and I came across a garment that was embellished with these hard outside wings that are known as elytra,” said Angus.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison historian on Wednesday won one of the nation’s most prestigious awards, which comes with a no strings attached $800,000 stipend to spend however she sees fit.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named UW-Madison professor Monica Kim, 44, as one of 25 national recipients of the MacArthur fellowship. Also known as the “genius grant,” the awards are given annually to a select group of individuals across a range of disciplines who show exceptional creativity in their work and future ambitions.
Erika Meitner recently arrived in Madison as a professor and master of fine arts program director in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s English Department. She’s written six books of poems, and her work frequently appears in anthologies. In her latest collection, Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that often renders women all but invisible. Meitner takes the podium Oct. 15 at the Central Library at 7:30 p.m.
Last December, Danielle Hairston Green took the stage in front of a roomful of strangers and told a witty, passionate story about “leaping and soaring” to overcome life’s obstacles. Not only did she receive raucous applause, but she also won that night’s monthly themed StorySLAM at the High Noon Saloon, sponsored by The Moth Madison.
On Oct. 14, Hairston Green will join nine other area storytellers at The Barrymore Theatre to compete in the first in-person Madison Moth GrandSLAM Championship since October 2019.
“It’s important for people to find a home to not only share their thoughts and experiences, but to do so in a space that’s nonjudgmental and where people are vulnerable,” says Hairston Green, who is director for the Human Development and Relationships Institute in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. “Sometimes at StorySLAMS, you’re in front of people you’ve never met and may never see again, and that’s a freeing experience.”
This year’s show is entitled Something’s Coming!, and features music from artists like Prince and Katy Perry as well as songs from West Side Story, Muolin Rouge and Footloose.
A new exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art explores stories of racism and resistance on the campus of UW-Madison. Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the curator of the exhibit joins the show to talk about the years-long effort.
