Rev. Carmen Porco, the subject of this new book, and the author UW-Madison Professor Dr. Chuck Taylor both sit down with Neil Heinen to share a preview of the remarkable life and journey of the man recognized as one of the leading experts on fair housing in the world.
Graphic novelist, cartoonist and creativity educator Lynda Barry of Madison is one of this year’s winners of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship, commonly known as a “genius” grant.
After expanding its daily hours, the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW-Madison campus is now the most “open” art museum in the country. We talk with the Chazen’s director about why the change was made and what’s in store for visitors.
It’s not too late to save the planet, according to a visually stunning documentary to be screened by UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies in advance of a pivotal United Nations climate summit.
For the first time, the Union Theater hosted an open piano day Sunday and invited community members to play the same instrument that the highest-level pianists have played.
I want my students to feel like they’re in a space that acknowledges that they are musicians and artists and they deserve to have spaces that sound good to them and are pleasing for their audiences,” Susan Cook, Director of the Mead Witter School of Music at UW-Madison, said.
The Madison public book launch is from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday night at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, where the Memorial students featured will read their stories and meet with audience members.
In 1985, of the estimated 2,500 children’s books published in the United States, only 18 were by black authors or illustrators, according to research by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Imagine students rehearsing without having music from another room flowing into their own, concert-goers buying tickets from a regular box office instead of a card table, and performers standing on a stage large enough to accommodate everyone.
In a dimly lit gallery in the School of Human Ecology on the UW-Madison campus sit three cases draped with linen. Beneath the coverings are funerary objects taken from Indigenous resting places — swatches of handmade cloth and bags that were meant to be used by the dead in the next world.
It’s not often that the men’s magazine Maxim makes its way into arts and culture criticism, but that noted periodical told its discerning readers that Evil Dead: The Musical is “one musical you’ll actually want to see.”
The brand new Hamel Music Center offered a first-look tour to the media of the state-of-the-art facilities on Sept.16. Located on the bustling intersection on University and N. Lake St., the structure houses a beautiful recital hall, rehearsal hall and concert hall all stemming from a grand, spacious lobby.
She has advocated for the normalization of LGBTQIA characters on television, including on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” in which the bisexual actress plays the role of Rosa Diaz, a no-nonsense, brave, smart, bisexual detective with a heart of gold.
She’s been inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, won the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award and others, and been listed as one of 12 women cartoonists deserving lifetime achievement recognition by the Comics Alliance. Barry is currently assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
She’s been inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, won the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award and others, and been listed as one of 12 women cartoonists deserving lifetime achievement recognition by the Comics Alliance. Barry is currently assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
A special partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison ?Jail Library Group, the Dane County Library Service and the Dane County Jail gives inmates a unique chance to share quality time with their kids through special audio book recordings.
Making Comics is Barry’s latest collage of comics and instruction, drawn from the course that she teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department, where she’s an associate professor.
At the time, Henry Jenkins was a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had grown up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland and bonded with his wife, Cynthia, over “Star Trek.” (He explained to me that the preferred term is Trekkers, not Trekkies.)
Pompey has an extensive background working with marching bands around the country. He said he first heard of UW Madison’s marching band several years ago when he was in Dallas. It was then he learned of Mike Leckrone, as well.
When asked about “replacing” a legend (Mike Leckrone): “The honest answer is you don’t! There is only one Mike Leckrone, and I’d be doing the band a disservice and myself a disservice, if I tried to emulate him.
“For our first show, you can expect a little bit of Beyonce, The Killers, Jonas Brothers and Adele,” Pompey said. “All four of those tunes will be done in three and a half minutes, but we will touch each one of those things. The second show, we are planning to do a funk show.”
“True accessibility starts with our doors being open,” said Director of Chazen Museum of Art Amy Gilman.
During World War II, Ms. Kuhlmann joined the Waves (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and was sent to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to take a three-month course to learn Morse code. Back in New York, she used that skill to communicate with ships at sea. She also had a radio show on WNEW for a time, “Navy Serenade.”
Noted: Soloway went on to attend Lane Tech College Prep, then University of Wisconsin-Madison. They worked as a production assistant, while creating plays with their sister Faith for Chicago’s Annoyance Theatre. Moving to Los Angeles, Soloway was soon writing for “The Steve Harvey Show,” “Six Feet Under” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Flowers’s loose, expressive line is a little messy, a little scribbly, with both cursive and all-caps text floating through the images. She is a protégée of the great cartoonist of childhood, Lynda Barry, also known for her expressive style. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barry has explained how important handwriting is to the experience of reading comics; in her view, judging “good” and “bad” drawing misses the point of comics, which has more to do with the personality of the hand of the cartoonist than with any kind of realism.
A construction worker is taking off the bolts that secure “Nails’ Tales” to its pedestal. The surgical unmounting of the 48-foot obelisk has begun. The crane in the parking lot behind it roars to life; it’s cold metal jib moves into position. Today, Aug. 21, is the last morning the work by renowned sculptor Donald Lipski will cast its controversial shadow outside Camp Randall Stadium along Regent Street.
A construction worker is taking off the bolts that secure “Nails’ Tales” to its pedestal. The surgical unmounting of the 48-foot obelisk has begun. The crane in the parking lot behind it roars to life; it’s cold metal jib moves into position. Today, Aug. 21, is the last morning the work by renowned sculptor Donald Lipski will cast its controversial shadow outside Camp Randall Stadium along Regent Street.
Deborah Blum is a science writer and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Prior to that, she was a professor of journalism at UW–Madison from 1997 to 2015. She is the author of many books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010) and The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2018).
80 years ago today, the Wizard of Oz premiered, cementing its place in cinematic history. But did you know a Watertown native and UW-Madison grad played a pivotal role in that movie?
Pete Lien of Edgerton is this week’s You Toon winner. His caption about Madison removing a controversial sculpture and being named the top college town in America beat out more than 50 entries.
Noted: We close out the summer’s birdy nerdery with a celebration of some of these bird geniuses, and learn how researchers are investigating their minds through experimentation and observation. UCLA pigeon researcher Aaron Blaisdell and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Lauren Riters join Ira and producer Christie Taylor to talk about the brightest minds of the bird world, and the burning questions remaining about avian brains.
The Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is home to a huge collection that includes post-revolution works from the former Soviet Union, paintings by Wisconsin artists that have a magical realism twist and a pair of large and provocative — some might say X-rated — ceramic goats that were once hidden behind screens.
A Stark County resident is tracing his German-Hungarian family’s roots through a project called Preservation on the Prairie. The project, which was sponsored by the Stark County Historical Society via grant from Humanities North Dakota, is headed by Anna Andrzejewski, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She, along with graduate students Travis Olson, Laura Grotjan and Carly Griffith, are working to preserve the history of Stark County’s German-Russian and German-Hungarian families.
“We get out a tape measure and we create floor plans of the buildings as well as sometimes drawings of the exterior of the buildings,” said Andrzejewski. “We’re using the buildings kind of to learn about the people, but we can’t do it just with measured drawings like this. We have to learn from maps, other kinds of records, atlases — talking to people is the best resource that we’ve found. You guys know when your properties were homesteaded. You have information that has been passed down to you about the history of these buildings, and that helps us fill the gaps.”
“The University has been very respectful and I’ve been assured that they are committed to working with me to find a new site for Nails’ Tales,” Lipski said in a statement to News 3 Now. “I think of it as halftime, and am expecting that by the end of the game, you will all be surprised and — I hope — delighted. Stay tuned!”
Creating thought-provoking movies that are well before their time, Ohio-based documentarian Julie Reichert has been called the Godmother of American independent film. Her progressive documentaries have earned her three Academy Award nominations and in 2018 she was given the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award. Known for challenging the status quo, it’s fitting that Cinematheque on UW-Madison’s campus will feature four weeks of her films in November.
American transplant surgeon Joshua Mezrich is a fun guy with a love of all things British. His disarming humour belies his gruelling work, creating life from loss. The 48-year-old, who is based at the University of Wisconsin, confesses to growing up on a diet of M*A*S*H and dinnertime tales from the ER, told by his engineer dad, who was training to become a doctor.
Noted: Lemke shared that Sanders was a UW-Madison grad where he lettered on the fencing team. He taught in the school of architecture and urban planning at UW-Milwaukee and was an author. Sanders and wife Gail, a Milwaukee Public Schools principal, raised three children on Sherman Boulevard.
Want to visit the Chazen? How about on Monday? At 6 p.m.?
Starting Sept. 3, when UW-Madison classes begin, the Chazen Museum of Art will be throwing open its doors seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. That’s a total of 84 hours per week, and more than all similar university-affiliated museums, according to a study conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art announced this week that it will be expanding its hours to be open seven days a week starting September 3.
Noted: How does one become a book-repair expert? O’Hara’s path began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she started on her master’s degree in 1990. While there, she began work in the preservation and conservation area in the basement of the library. She learned to triage and do everything from “tipping” an entire torn page into place to disassembling a book to wash the pages, then put it back together.
“An artist’s studio is a very vulnerable place, and I respect that. I always feel like I’m entering a very personalized space,” says Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen Museum of Art and curator of the museum’s current exhibit “In the Studio.”
Noted: Steve Zacharias (screenwriter): The story was actually a true story at the University of Wisconsin. Our next-door neighbor didn’t get into any of the fraternities so he started his own fraternity. They’d lose 80-to-nothing in football, and their parties were nerdy, but they had fun.
Starting this fall, the Chazen Museum of Art will be open for 84 hours a week — an increase of 36 hours from its current schedule — which UW-Madison says will make it the “most open” in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
A brand new city street has been named in honor of legendary bassist, jazz master and retired UW-Madison music professor Richard Davis.
Quoted: Noted UW historian William Cronon compares Madison to Washington, D.C. “Although it is a capital city with dozens of museums — surely more than any other city in the U.S. — not one of them is devoted solely to the history of the city itself,” Cronon says.
Noted: The podcast’s audio vaults include recordings from the Moth, Madison Story Slam, Listen to Your Mother — a national series of live readings founded by Madison’s Ann Imig that ran in 33 cities from 2012-2017 — and the UW Odyssey Project, a program that offers UW-Madison humanities classes to adult students facing economic barriers to college.
The native of Gadsden, Alabama, completed her master’s degree in piano performance at UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music in May 2018. She has been accepted to the school’s doctoral program in musical composition, which she will begin this fall.
Mildred Fish Harnack was born in Milwaukee and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she met her husband, Arvid, an economist born in Germany. The Harnacks moved to Berlin as the Great Depression took hold. Arvid took a job with the German government while Mildred taught and completed her doctorate.
“I learned about Mildred because she is from Wisconsin and there was a Mildred Harnack Day in Wisconsin every year on her birthday. She is a Milwaukee native and she attended UW-Madison.”
Sanford Biggers constantly looks for creative ways to spark challenging conversations through his painting, sculpture, video and live performances. Sanford, who is black, says art plays a vital role in promoting those conversations, especially when topics become volatile and uncomfortable to discuss.
Japan’s “floating world” has long provided the West with fantasies of both attachment and detachment, with the promise of refashioning our lives by “decluttering” and surrounding ourselves with only the most exquisite objects. Marie Kondo offers us a dream of minimalist Japanese beauty not unlike the dream of Japan that first enchanted the West in the Victorian period.
During September workshops, UW-Madison scientists and local and national streets artists will design murals on themes including molecular structure, astrophysics and diversity in science. The exact number of murals will depend on how much money WID is able to raise.
Film2Future, which has served more than 100 students so far, stays with students throughout their high school years – its first graduating class begins college this fall, with four students earning full-ride scholarships to Syracuse, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USC and the University of Chicago.
Before he was a Tony award-winning actor and ahead of becoming a Broadway legend, André De Shields was cast as Tiger Lily in a “Peter Pan” play on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that caused a stir for its nude depictions of sirens.
This is the story of a book deal, a substantial advance and the kismet of a cultural moment. It’s about a first-time author finding her subject and following her dream. And it begins with women talking to each other — about their voices.
Before he was a Tony award-winning actor and ahead of becoming a Broadway legend, André De Shields was cast as Tiger Lily in a “Peter Pan” play on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that caused a stir for its nude depictions of sirens.
At 73, University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus André De Shields receieved his first Tony Award in the category of Best Actor in a Featured Role. We talk to the actor about his performance in the Tony-winning musical “Hadestown.”
Noted: “There isn’t a huge market for studio art in Madison. I’ve sold one or two pieces in the last two years — my markets are Texas and New York,” says Michael Velliquette, an associate professor at UW-Madison who calls his work “paper sculpture.” His contributions to CSArt are small paper “meditation tools.”
The program’s near-century of summers will be lauded June 27 at a Summer Music Clinic 90th Anniversary Celebration held on campus at the University Club. The $25 fee to attend the celebration will benefit the long-running camp and scholarships (the deadline to purchase tickets is Wednesday).
Noted: Born in Madison, Metz White earned a bachelor’s degree in art education from UW-Madison and moved to Milwaukee, where she taught creative arts at Urban Day School.
