The band’s origins come from Fountain of Life Church on Madison’s south side, where Saffold, Dr. LaVar Charlston, Anthony Ward and Marcus Fleming were church musicians. Each of them were regularly asked to perform at weddings and other functions, and over time it became clear they had something special.
There’s a renewed push to restore Academy Award-winning actor Fredric March’s name on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
A student-led group voted in 2018 to remove the UW alum’s name from a theater in Memorial Union because of his association with a student group that shared a name with the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century.
This history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and president of the American Historical Association tried to say something sensible, and partially succeeded. It is, however, perilous to deviate even microscopically from progressive orthodoxy, as enforced by today’s censorious professoriate, so he experienced Twitter crucifixion. His “crap” was “white-centric” and advocating “white supremacist Aryan eugenicist” history, etc. Sweet’s critics reduced him to quivering contrition because he had written this:
And since 2012, Barry, a 66-year-old who in 2019 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius grant — has been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has held various positions and now does cross-disciplinary teaching on creativity. So when it comes to self-expression, to making art, it’s fair to say that she’s an expert. But in many ways, not nearly as much of an expert as your average little kid, which is something Barry has been thinking about a lot lately.
That’s one of the many messages of Quanda Johnson’s exhibit “Trauerspiel: Subject Into Nonbeing,” an autoethnographic meditation on anti-Black violence and its consequential trauma that is now on display at the Chazen Museum of Art in downtown Madison.
She was expected to go to Cornell University with her boyfriend of three years, but she read an article about the University of Wisconsin and “something came over me”, she says. “And I thought: ‘I’m going to this other place.’”
UW Varsity Band Concert 2022, 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26
Third-year director Corey Pompey leads the UW Varsity Band through a mix of new material and familiar favorites, including a tribute to the music of Queen and a salute to members of our nation’s armed forces.
Poem by Paul Tran, a poet and an editor whose debut collection, from which this poem is taken, is “All the Flowers Kneeling” (Penguin Books, 2022). They are an assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Explore John Bascom, the colorful President of the University of Wisconsin from 1874-1887 who championed women’s rights, worker’s rights, temperance, the pursuit of truth, and a notion that would go on to earn fame as “The Wisconsin Idea.” Professor Emeritus of History J. David Hoeveler, of UW Milwaukee, whose most recent book is John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea, sheds light on the important Wisconsin figure.
Two well-known names from UW-Madison will now be part of the 11-member body that advises the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the university announced Thursday. Amy Gilman, director of the UW-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, and Dipesh Navsaria, professor in the School of Human Ecology and of pediatrics and adolescent medicine in the School of Medicine and Public Health, were named Aug. 12 as new members of the National Museum and Library Services Board.
“A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said” (University of Wisconsin Press), in Trade Paperback and eBook formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound
Kuku’s stories are delectable and fun, but they also reveal the ridiculousness of gender expectations and the sexual politics that assign men and women rigid roles in intimate relationships.
-Dr Ainehi Edoro is assistant professor of global black literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder and editor-in-chief of Brittle Paper, an online magazine for African literature
Quoted: “What any curriculum should be is thoughtful, give students something they don’t already have, and make them into what we may call critical democratic citizens,” Michael Apple said. He’s the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Apple says the efforts to ban “Flamer” and other books centered around the LGBTQ+ experience are part of a well organized campaign.
He adds that “Flamer” is an award-winning book about acceptance and self-discovery.
Daniel Grabois, an assistant professor of horn at UW-Madison, joins the show to tell us what electro-acoustic music is, and to tell us about the Electro-Acoustic Research Space that makes it possible for him and his students to experiment with instruments.
Noted: The American Institute of Architects Wisconsin bestowed honor awards, the Wisconsin Architectural Awards program’s highest recognition, on four projects designed by its members.
Another eight projects received merit awards including:
• Hamel Music Hall, Madison. Strang Inc., Steinberg Hart.
University of Wisconsin’s Mead Witter School of Music’s concert and performance space uses the “warmth of precast concrete (which) echoes the limestone of other iconic campus buildings, but the form of the Music Center reflects the forward-thinking, progressive ‘Wisconsin Idea,'” the nomination said.
Over the past few weeks, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend has opened two new exhibitions by indigenous artists to the public.
On July 23, the museum opened Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones’s first major retrospective, which features 120 photos from sixteen bodies of work over 25 years.
“There’s something that a friend of mine said once,” says Jones, a professor of photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “She came to a show, and she’s like, ‘Your work is so beautiful, but then when you really look at it and get up on it, it slaps you in the face.’”
Noted: “Heat 2” is the first of three planned novels (one of which may be related to “Heat”), and an ambitious literary beginning for a man who had never attempted a work of fiction before. He majored in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with thoughts of becoming a teacher, but decided that would be “really immensely boring.” Asked to cite literary influences, he mentions John le Carre, but otherwise says he doesn’t read crime fiction. Instead, he looks to “primary sources,” the various killers, crooks, law enforcers and government agents he has met and befriended and whose stories he adapted for “Heat,” “Thief” and other films.
Jo Handelsman, a UW-Madison biologist and director for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, warns in her new book “A World Without Soil” that global soil erosion is an invisible crisis. We have the author on to discuss the harms of worldwide soil erosion and what can be done to stop it.
Noted: Jerry himself became a student at the University of Wisconsin School of Music after high school, graduating with bachelor’s degree in music education in 1958. He played in local dance bands and began working as a music teacher in the Madison area.
Jones, a photography professor at UW-Madison, is having an especially big year. This summer alone his artwork — steeped in his perspective as a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation — is part of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. On Saturday, the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend will celebrate the opening of his first major retrospective, “Tom Jones: Here We Stand,” featuring some 130 works from 16 series that span his career.
Bassist Richard Davis, who played with bebop and rock titans alike, lives in Madison, where he started a second act as a beloved teacher himself at the University of Wisconsin.
Bassist Richard Davis, who played with bebop and rock titans alike, lives in Madison, where he started a second act as a beloved teacher himself at the University of Wisconsin.
The Jewish family can be considered the core of Jewish identity. At a four-day event, attendees can develop a rich understanding about the history and function of family in a Jewish context, according to organizers.
“In many ways, the Jewish story is a family story,” said Cara Rock-Singer, co-chair of the Greenfield Institute Committee. “There are so many different formations and meanings of family related to issues about how families function and work to produce and reproduce Jewish life.”
The 22nd annual Greenfield Summer Institute, which is part of the George L. Mosse and Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be held July 11-14, 2022, featuring the theme of “The Jewish Family across Time and Place.”
I’ll be a fellow at the Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for the next academic year and am hoping to write my second novel there.
Wisconsin Public Media and the Educational Communications Board joined broadcasters from around the state to celebrate the life and career of former WPM Director Gene Purcell who was one of four people inducted into the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame on June 23, 2022. Purcell was a longtime WPR reporter, regional manager, and former director of the ECB before becoming director of WPM at UW-Madison in 2018. He was killed in a traffic collision in August 2021.
Richard Goodkin wrote the first draft of what would become his new novel, “Mourning Light,” over the course of a few months back in 1993. For the University of Wisconsin–Madison French professor, working on the novel was a way of processing some difficult personal emotions surrounding the loss of his partner two years earlier — and so he wrote a fictionalized story about a UW–Madison professor who loses his partner during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Noted: She started producing music, drawing equally from her childhood opera training and love of noise, while in college at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her debut, The Spoils, was released by Sacred Bones in 2009, when she was still a student, after which she moved to Los Angeles. After time in the Northwest and the Northeast, and four more albums later, she moved into a house she built with her two uncles, a contractor and an electrical engineer, on the land where she grew up.
Old American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867, and died in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 9, 1959. He began by studying mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin but dropped out after four semesters to pursue a job that launched him directly in his architectural field.
A new book about a women’s sports pioneer at the University of Wisconsin offers an important and overlooked story of the school’s athletic department that adds crucial context for anyone whose idea of Badgers sports history is limited to Alan “The Horse” Ameche and “Badger” Bob Johnson.
Noted: Books written by historically underrepresented authors increased by 3% in 2020, to 26.8%, while books written about racially diverse characters increased by only 1% to 30%, according to Kathleen Horning, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center. This progress has been further threatened by right-wing efforts to banish the discussion of race from classrooms altogether.
Humorology — more commonly referred to as “Humo” — made a big return to Shannon Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Memorial Union last weekend with a presentation of “The Way Back Home.” Since 1947, Humo has dedicated 75 years to building friendships across members in Greek Life.
After making it through the 2020 football season without fans, Corey Pompey said the feeling of his marching band returning to a Camp Randall Stadium full of Badger fans for the first time in 2021 was indescribable.
“For a large chunk of the band, they (had) never marched in the stadium before,” said Pompey, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Marching Band. “They never had that crowd response.”
An installation of textile panels is suspended from the ceiling of the three-story Elvehjem Building at the Chazen Museum of Art. The exhibit, “Suspended Landscapes,” displays the work of Canadian artist Amanda McCavour. The work was commissioned to mark the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2020.
The textiles are the result of an unusual collaboration between 15 University of Wisconsin-Madison students from a variety of disciplines and 15 artisans half a world away in India. Connecting them was Judy Frater, the UW Division of the Arts interdisciplinary artist-in-residence for the spring semester.
Noted: The game was produced by PBS Wisconsin Education, Wisconsin Sea Grant, and Field Day Learning Games — an educational game developer within the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research and Wisconsin educators. It complements the PBS Wisconsin Shipwrecks! documentary and virtual reality experience exploring wrecks on the bottom of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes.
The UW Varsity Band is set to perform at the Kohl Center this weekend for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UW-Madison varsity band’s annual spring concert is back this week for the first time since 2019. It’s the first time without Mike Leckrone conducting the show, so we talk to new director Corey Pompey about taking his place and leading the band into the future.
Ajanae Dawkins, a Detroit native and UW-Madison alum, is the 2022 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art in downtown Cincinnati.
For years, Ahna Skop didn’t feel like she fit the mold of a scientist.
She comes from a family of artists. Her father, Michael Skop, was a pupil of a famous Croatian artist, Ivan Meštrović, and her dad brought in students from all over the world to an art school they had at their house. Her mother, Kathleen Prince Skop, is a ceramicist and retired high school art teacher.
“Here I am as a scientist,” said the geneticist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You might assume that I inherited the recessive gene for science.”
“Pitches and Notes,” a longtime treble choir based at UW-Madison, is headed later this month to compete for top honors in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, or ICCA, in New York City. It’s the same competition that spawned the “Pitch Perfect” series of three movies and the 2015 reality TV docuseries “Sing It On.”
Among 120 life-size, orange statues of women scientists that stood last month on the National Mall in Washington D.C. was the likeness of Ahna Skop, a UW-Madison geneticist and artist. We talk to Skop about the connections between art and science.
When Sophie Jester, a sophomore biology major at University of Wisconsin-Madison, auditioned for Pitches & Notes, a treble a cappella group on campus, she didn’t think she would make it. Now, a little over a year later, Jester and the rest of the group will head to New York to perform in the upcoming in-person International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA). This is the first time that a group from UW-Madison will be competing at an in-person ICCA finals, set for Saturday, April 23, at The Town Hall in Times Square.
Pitches & Notes is the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s only competitive treble-voiced a cappella group, consisting of 17 members who all share the same love for singing and performing. What makes Pitches & Notes so special is their unique group of people whose commitment to the group is undeniable.
Pitches & Notes qualifies for first finals in group’s history after winning regional semifinals.
Quoted: While Tom Purnell — a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of English language and linguistics — was living in Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s, he said the cash dispensing machines in that area were called MAC (money access centers).
“ATM (automated teller machine) is the generic term that is being used more widely now, overtaking the local variants,” he said in an email.
“A lot of changes and variations in pronunciation reflect things that not just happen in our mouths, but also what happens in our ears,” said Joe Salmons, a longtime professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In many languages, when there’s an “l” at the end of a syllable, it will mess with how people hear a preceding vowel, he explained, especially when the “l” is in the same syllable.
A similar example of this is pillow v. “pellow,” he noted.
The “melk” pronunciation is also heard in other parts of the Midwest, he said. And while it’s not exclusive to the state, it appears to be most common in eastern Wisconsin.
Wisconsin: Chazen Museum of Art, MadisonWhether it’s paintings, sculptures, photography, drawings or print works that float your boat, the Chazen Museum of Art located in the University of Wisconsin–Madison will not disappoint. Having just reopened, permanent and rotating exhibits showcase American and European artworks and you can take a guided tour for the lowdown on the history of some 20,000 works of art across all genres.
Over the past semester, University of Wisconsin-Madison dance professor Chris Walker worked with freshmen and alumni of First Wave — a scholarship program for hip hop and urban arts — to bring Danez Smith’s poem “summer, somewhere” to life, fusing dance, theater and music.
Her MFA in sculpture came from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Piece by Gregg Mitman.
The New Yorker relies on an algorithm from Robert Nowak, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nowak said on WPR’s “The Morning Show” that the algorithm collects the ratings and over time pushes more successful captions to the top of a sorted list. It’s similar to how a search engine such as Google tracks how many times a website is chosen after a given search.’
So roughly speaking, the funnier the caption, the more ratings it receives, providing a more statistically accurate estimate of just how funny it is,” he said.
The Journal Sentinel and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin will livestream several democracy-focused programs this spring from the University of Wisconsin-Madison LaFollette School of Public Affairs.
The first, today at 5 p.m., features Harvard University Professor of Government Daniel Carpenter, who will discuss his book “Democracy by Petition,” which traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent.
If you’re jaded by GPS, if you think maps are mere representations of reality, The Cartographers would like a word with you.
These savants, who mastered the arts of scale and legend at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, know that maps can be portals, too.
In our new feature, “Digest,” Isthmus interviews unsung or behind-the-scenes members of the service industry and lets them speak for themselves.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, 31, is a poet, an instructor at UW-Madison, and the current artist-in-residence at StartingBlock. She’s also a part-time server. She has worked at restaurants in New York City and Madison, including Willalby’s Cafe, Settle Down Tavern and Diner in WIlliamsburg, Brooklyn. Currently she works a couple lunch shifts a week at Morris Ramen.
“It’s been three years since our last conference” because of the COVID-19 pandemic, “so everyone is super-excited,” said Emily Arthur, an associate professor of art at UW-Madison and a member of the conference steering committee. The 2022 event also marks SGCI’s 50th anniversary as an organization.
Wisconsin Watch has been named a finalist in 12 categories in the Milwaukee Press Club’s 2021 Excellence in Journalism contest.
Whether the entries won gold, silver or bronze will be announced in May. Three of the awards are shared with news partners and one award is shared with students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Idea: The Wisconsin Regional Art Program hired painter John Steuart Curry in 1936 as the first artist-in-residence at a U.S. university. Curry, and later Aaron Bohrod, worked with groups around the state to encourage to encourage small-town and rural artists. The program valued art created not only by professors and artists, but also by regular people, Sawkins said.
Signs are static.
They can, of course, convey concise and relevant historical information. But they are limited to one point in time, said Kasey Keeler, an assistant professor of civil society and community studies and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That’s why Keeler is leading a project, “Mapping Dejope: Indigenous Histories and Presence in Madison,” which will make Indigenous history of the area digitally accessible.
The Black Voice news publication was first created in 1971 with the mission to provide a safe space for Black and African diasporic students attending UW-Madison. “We The Vision,” which will be presented at Marquee Cinema in Union South on Tuesday, March 1, 6 p.m., is the tale of The Black Voice’s origins, influence and legacy told by many of the voices who have shaped its success. The documentary commemorates the 50th anniversary of the founding of The Black Voice, during the 2020-21 school year.
Downtown Madison is not new to the debate over historic monuments. But thanks to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and a UW-Madison art professor, State Street’s iconography is now home to a new kind of monument. The museum unveiled its newest installation Tuesday evening, “Blu³eprint,” a 12,000-pound limestone sculpture designed by Faisal Abdu’Allah. For Abdu’Allah, it is a deeply personal piece that aims to reimagine the role of identity in public art.
