Formats and preoccupations change, but comics never lose their power to communicate, criticize and entertain.
“Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics,” presented through Nov. 22 by the Museum of Wisconsin Art in two locations, surveys our state’s role in the great hurly-burly of funny words and pictures, especially from underground and alternative points of view.
Sometimes people would say things — though I don’t think they’re meant to harm or even be insulting, but they came out condescending. You know, calling the University of Wisconsin a state school, which totally blew me away.
The proposed legislation, which stems from a summit Bell organized in 2017 with the S.C. Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Law School, would create an independent use-of-force advisory board that includes members of law enforcement organizations, legal scholars, mental health professionals and criminal defense attorneys.
Johnson, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theater studies, was a spectacular interviewee. I was impressed with her experience and her clear-eyed description of the challenges of being a Black artist transplanted to Madison. She is a polymath, seamlessly shifting between academic research, writing, singing, activism and poetry. In her hands, the lines between these areas blur.
Noted: Developed by University of Wisconsin students in 2018, the music discovery streaming app launched for Apple’s iOS In July 2019, growing to about 100,000 users, 200,000 song uploads and 15 full-time employees in the year since.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Greene earned his Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees, he was deeply influenced by jazz piano teacher Joan Wildman, who died this year. “It hit me pretty hard,” says Greene. “She was fiercely creative and always encouraged me to do my own thing.”
I think of the frictions in my life, too. Legos underfoot. Track changes. Heavy books. Grading. Laundry. Emails. Cardio. Recycling. Which frictions are about privilege, and which help me move in the world with weight and worry, using that friction to open the jar, to pay attention, to feel the potential in the things around me?
Sarah Anne Carter runs the Center for Design and Material Culture at UW-Madison. She writes about museums and making sense of the world.
The morning of Friday 24 July 2020 was a day of mixed emotions in Tanzania. Many were saddened by the news that former President Benjamin William Mkapa had passed away. But his death triggered negative emotions too.
Noted: When they were at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker and future ComedySportz founder Dick Chudnow launched the Kentucky Fried Theater comedy troupe.
TIME asked 21 historians, including Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology Nan Estad, to weigh in with their picks for “worst moments” that hold a lesson—and what they think those experiences can teach us.
“Most of the general public in the U.S. has no understanding of the very long history of slavery in the northern colonies and the northern states,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island.
In 2018, according to the Children’s Cooperative Book Center at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, fewer than a third of all children’s and young adult books in the United States featured a person of color as a main character. Only around one fifth were written or illustrated by a person of color, despite the fact that now most young children in this country are nonwhite.
At the end of the credits, Stewart thanks Rockport and Polk County, in Georgia, and Kathy Cramer. The former were the locations where “Irresistible” was filmed. Cramer is the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor whose 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment” explored the role of disaffected rural voters in Wisconsin’s shift to the right. In 2017, Stewart reached out to Cramer, spending a day with her in Wisconsin, visiting some of the places and people she visited while researching her book.
In 2015, Gardiner and two other friends, Khoa Tran and Kelly Montgomery, founded an online publishing company called JKX Comics. At the time, the three were pursuing Ph.D.s in different fields at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And they knew how tough it can be to explain research or engage students in the nuances of science.
Data collected in 2018 by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education program, showed that approximately six percent of children’s books worldwide were written by African or African American authors; Latinx authors claimed roughly five percent of the lot.
FARM GIRLA Wisconsin MemoirBy Beuna Coburn Carlson216 pp. University of Wisconsin. Paper, $21.95.
Raised in Madison, her dad played basketball for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1970s. Her parents later moved back to Wisconsin Rapids, where they grew up, after a period in Los Angeles so Brey could pursue acting.
Noted: “The Coyotes of Carthage” (Ecco), by Steven Wright. In a UW-Madison law professor’s satirical debut, a political operative tries to save his career by masterminding a dark money campaign for corporate mining interests.
Last summer, UW–Madison alumna Taren Mansfield had just two weeks to pack her belongings and relocate to Los Angeles after finding out about the opportunity of a lifetime. She left Madison to spend the next four months in Shondaland — Shonda Rhimes’s television production company — working on alongside actors such as Viola Davis on the hit TV show How to Get Away with Murder.
This year, those students lost the opportunity for the annual performance at “Africa Night” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The program, part of the UW Community Arts Collaboratory, or Arts Collab, will instead try to bring the arts community together with several virtual performances.
Here & Now’s Tonya Mosley speaks with Rebekah Pryor Paré, associate dean for the Career Initiative in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Art student Callum White said he is the most frustrated with the fact that he won’t have access to specific equipment he needs in classes, such as glass blowing.
An unfortunately common experience that many who want to go into teaching face are receiving unsolicited comments on their finances or uncertainties in their future.
In conservation circles, a litmus test for decisions often is expressed in a question: What would Aldo do (WWAD)?
Aldo is of course Aldo Leopold, the late, great University of Wisconsin professor, pioneer of wildlife management and supreme observer of nature and humankind.
So Brandon Taylor wrote about why he left science in an essay for Buzzfeed. It’s a story that starts at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he went to study biochemistry.
“Parkland” describes Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, student protests that came in response.
Before becoming the writer and editor that he is today, Brandon Taylor was a doctoral student and biomedical researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And it is that period of his life that he draws on heavily for his debut novel, “Real Life.”
After the coronavirus outbreak caused the university to cancel in-person classes, the couple switched gears. Connected digitally with their students, Barson and Rodriguez have been working to finish the class project in a digital space.
While the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW-Madison campus is closed, staff encourage would-be guests to peruse the free museum’s permanent collection of more than 23,000 works online.
Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book, Hard Damage, (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. She was part of the 2018–2019 Ron Wallace Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: Boswell bookseller Chris Lee recommends “The Coyotes of Carthage” (Ecco, out April 14), a novel by University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Steven Wright. Lee called it a “hilarious assessment of dark money campaigns for corporate clients. … Ironies abound in this thing.”
Organizers of the 2020 Wisconsin Film Festival, set to begin April 2, canceled the event out of concern for public safety in the face of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.
In a statement on the band’s website, officials said that the university’s suspension of face-to-face classes would prohibit the Badger Band from meeting to rehearse for at least four weeks.
Wallace is a graduate student at an unnamed large Midwestern university (Taylor holds a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison).
When he set out to write a novel, Brandon Taylor, a former doctoral student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, approached it like a scientist.
Like many students, composer and pianist Becca May Grant was clueless about life beyond the UW-Madison campus when she arrived in Madison in 1994. After all, why should a young white girl from Lakeville, Minnesota, know anything about the city’s diverse south side neighborhoods and the people who live there? But then a service learning project at Fountain of Life Covenant Church introduced her to a new world, just down the road from the university. And she forged a connection with that new world through the power of gospel music.
The surest sign of spring for Madison movie fans is the release of the guide to the eight-day Wisconsin Film Festival, the campus-based event that brings independent film premieres, classic films, filmmakers and more to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and AMC Madison 6.
The similarities between Wallace and Taylor are strong. They are both from the south, queer, black, and felt deeply unhappy with the PhD programs they completed in the midwest. One day, fed up, Taylor decided to drop out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and commit himself to becoming a writer.
Author of ’The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ urges students to stay curious.
A new book from University of Wisconsin-Madison poet Amaud Jamaul Johnson — “Imperial Liquor” — taps into themes of paternal protectiveness, the pervasiveness of racism and the possibility of empathy.
The 92nd annual student art show is now up and running at the Memorial Union, highlighting sculptures, neon installations and paintings created and curated by University of Wisconsin-Madison students.
The monumental James Watrous mural was moved from the Webcrafters building on Fordem Avenue to the Chazen Museum of Art.
We talk with a UW-Madison professor about his effort to take the political pulse of three battleground states, including Wisconsin. Then we chat with the producer of the Emmy-winning Beat Making Lab about Afrofuturism.
Appleton native and University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna Brenda Rae will be singing the role of Poppea in Handel’s opera “Agrippina” on Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The performance will be broadcast live over the NPR News and Classical Music Network of WPR beginning at 1 p.m. that day. It will also be live streamed at many movie theaters around Wisconsin.
Noted: According to “The Dictionary of American Regional English,” the massive dialect dictionary produced over half a century at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,one of the first uses of “bubbler” in connection with a drinking fountain was in material from Kohler Co. in Sheboygan County in 1914, citing a Kohler fountain that was “fitted with … nickel-plated brass self-closing bubbling valve … adjustable for a continuous flow of water. … Can also furnish … continuous flow bubbler with above fountain.”
Note that it’s an adjective there, not a noun.
Joan Houston Hall, former chief editor of the dictionary, told Wisconsin Public Radio in 2015 that “bubbler” usage “mirrors the marketing area of the Kohler Company of 1918 or so,” chiefly in eastern Wisconsin, and especially in the southeastern corner of the state.
University of Wisconsin alumni Virgil Abloh continues to make ripples in the fashion and design world since graduating in 2003 with a degree in civil engineering.
Award-winning science writer and author Rebecca Skloot is set to give a lecture in Shannon Hall at Memorial Union on March 4.
“Real Life” is a raw, uncomfortable and deeply powerful look at what it means to be black and queer in a university setting much like Madison’s. The novel, released Tuesday, is written by former Madison resident Brandon Taylor, who was a biochemistry doctoral student himself at UW-Madison, and decided to leave the program to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about four years ago.
Maidenberg, 42, grew up in Israel until age 7, when her family moved to New Jersey. She came to San Francisco in 2000, shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she focused on “African and Diasporic studies with focus on contemporary African Art,”
CORNISH: What in your scientific training did you bring to how you approached and wrote the book? I mean, as we talked about, you were a student at the University of Wisconsin. You have this science background. What of that did you end up bringing it – to trying to put together a novel?
It was written by Don Voegeli, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and the longtime music director at WHA (now known as Wisconsin Public Radio).
Doug Erickson, a university relations specialist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been in a co-ed seven-person book group for 12 years. The most important part of a book club for him is the members. “You need to approach the membership of your book club with the precision, pragmatism and ruthlessness of the NFL draft. You can’t be sentimental. Be extremely wary of the overtalker and the mansplainer,” he says. “One blowhard can ruin the whole thing.”
At last, after having written three apprentice novels, I’d had enough of floundering alone and applied to MFA programs. The day I got into the one at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I wept for hours, because that was the program where Lorrie Moore taught.
Amy Quan Barry is an English professor at UW-Madison who has written four books of poetry and a novel about Vietnam. Her new book, due out March 3, is something completely different.
As a public radio listener, you’re probably familiar with the theme song for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” It’s had a few variations over the decades.
But did you know it was originally composed in Madison in 1971?
It was written by Don Voegeli, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and the longtime music director at WHA (now known as Wisconsin Public Radio).
“It’s truly an honor to be here to support my friend for all the things you’ve accomplished from teenagehood to adulthood to beyond,” said Sofia Snow, Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI)/ First Wave Director and First Wave First Cohort Alumna.
The New Yorker said of Don’t Call Us Dead that Smith’s poems “can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination”. That imagination was honed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Smith studied before going on to form the Dark Noise Collective with other artists including Franny Choi, with whom Smith co-hosts the poetry podcast VS.
When he set out to write a novel, Brandon Taylor, a former doctoral student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, approached it like a scientist.
Award-winning author Marlon James will give a free lecture at the Madison Central Library on Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. as part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate (WUD) Distinguished Lecture Series. James will tackle a variety of topics, according to WUD, including writing, the Caribbean, and race and gender.
The Chazen Museum of Art has long showcased art by UW-Madison faculty. And this year, in celebration of the museum’s 50th anniversary, the faculty show is bringing artists from across the university together to showcase everything from painting to modern dance and even cooking.
