University of Wisconsin, Madison, Marching Band Director Mike Leckrone’s illustrious 50-year career is coming to an end, culminating with his final spring concert series in April.
Story includes Timothy Yu, Leslie Bow and Lori Kido-Lopez.
For the last 15 years, Wei Dong, a professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has taken students to China on an international study abroad program that examines the concepts of feng shui.
Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance. –Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism.
Noted: Von Haden loved drawing as a child and often focused on fashion illustrations. She knew when she arrived for college at UW-Madison she wanted to focus on fashion. After a semester in New York City at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Von Haden returned to Madison for her senior year in 2017. During that year she taught herself embroidery, intending to include it in her clothing collection for her senior project. “Then I abandoned the clothes and focused just on the embroidery,” Von Haden says. “I became aware of the waste and unsustainability in fast fashion and I realized I didn’t want to be part of the never-ending cycle of new clothes.”
For many residents, the city of Madison is a waystation. A college town. A pleasurable stop to learn or live for several years on their way to other things and places. With this in mind, Postmadison was born, an exhibit at the Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) until April 6, featuring four artists who once called Madison home.
Lake Mills High School English students have been learning to expand their horizons by taking part in University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Great World Texts.
The first person to articulate the frontier thesis was a University of Wisconsin historian who was little regarded at the time, Frederick Jackson Turner.
Noted: This restoration was backed in part by the University of Wisconsin, where Keene taught until her death at 52. It’s a fitting tribute to a filmmaker gone far too soon.
(Where) My Body Did Not Endafter Loose Strife by Quan BerryDraw a map with no beginning
you were not born but plucked from tree vast and placeless mark the spot in your mother’s garden( ) you broke water
Nesha Ruther is a poet hailing from Takoma Park, Maryland. She was a member of the 2015 DC Youth Slam Team and a 2016 YoungArts winner in spoken word. She currently attends the University of Wisconsin Madison as part of the tenth cohort of First Wave.
University of Madison alumni Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun debuted 60 years ago today.
Photography has always been a combination of art and science, even as the techniques of making a photograph have evolved. An exhibition in Madison called Un/Seen wants viewers to think about the history of photography as not only about art and image making, but also how it’s connected to the histories of science, alchemy, and magic. According to Sarah Anne Carter of the Chipstone Foundation it’s the processes we don’t see that give us the final images we do.
I folk danced on weekends, biked on rural roads, swam in forest lakes, and had potluck dinners with friends I had known for decades. I delighted in movies by independent filmmakers, attended folk music concerts, and met acquaintances for ice cream on the University of Wisconsin’s legendary Memorial Union Terrace.
The publisher Lee & Low, which tracks diversity statistics, notes that “37 percent of the U.S. population are people of color, but only 13 percent of the children’s books published in the last 24 years contain multicultural content.” In 1985, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison began counting the number of kids’ books written or illustrated by African-Americans.
Sean Hanish remembers the night when, as a University of Wisconsin-Madison college student, he fell in love. Not with a fellow student. With making movies.
UW-Madison junior Shasparay Lighteard felt there was something vital missing in the city where she lives — and she wanted to change that. So she created a festival.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Marching Band Director Mike Leckrone’s 50-year career will come to a close at the end of the spring semester, and longtime seamstress Lois Levenhagen is making sure he goes out with a bang.
Shasparay Lighteard hit upon the idea for the Black Arts Matter (B.A.M.) Festival after noticing a division between Madison’s black community and UW-Madison. Keeping in mind the vibrant black arts community back in her hometown of Austin, Texas, she set out to pull together a week of events to bridge that gap.
GLOSS By Rebecca Hazelton. (University of Wisconsin, paper, $14.95.) Hazelton’s poems cast a teasing light over the surface sheen of social norms, the playacting in every relationship: “Let’s pretend to be with other people,” one ends, “until we’re with other people.” But beneath their own witty surfaces, the poems also brim with loss and serious moral inquiry.
It’s more than a little disturbing to know that Trouble in Mind was written in the early 1950s.
The play, which runs through March 9 at the Bartell Theatre, is a witty and poignant sendup of backstage dynamics in a “colored play” headed to Broadway.
Thanks to a first-time collaboration between UW-Madison’s Afro-American Studies department and Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theatre (KRASS), Madison audiences are getting a chance to see what has changed — and what has stayed the same — in the world of race relations since then.
John, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, was inspired to start a gallery of his own after exploring the art scenes of both Milwaukee and Madison. Upon sharing this idea with his sister Katherine, the two set out developing a one of a kind online gallery from the ground up.
Artist Rashaad Newsome seems well-suited to be the UW-Madison’s Spring 2019 Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence. The New York-based artist combines several disciplines including collage, performance, film and even computer programming, to create works that are always changing.
This is the first installment of a monthly Madison Magazine blog diving deep into the Madison music scene by Logan Rude, a University of Wisconsin–Madison senior and the editor-in-chief of Emmie, the student-run bi-annual music magazine.
When Alice Childress’ first full-length drama, Trouble in Mind, was first produced in 1955, it ran for 91 performances. Afterward, Childress became the first black woman to win an Obie Award for the play, which was inspired by her own experiences as an actor.
Wisconsin Singers features the top student performers from UW-Madison to sing, dance or work behind the scenes of their shows.
The Stephen Sondheim stage musical, which runs Thursday to Feb. 24 in Memorial Union’s Shannon Hall, has united the stellar talents of UW-Madison’s school of music and theater programs.
Noted: A University of Wisconsin professor and a pioneer of wildlife management, Leopold compiled a book of ecological essays and observations of nature in the 1940s. Published in 1949, a year after his death, “A Sand County Almanac” has sold millions of copies and influenced waves of conservationists who have followed him, inspired by the principle he expressed in his essay “The Land Ethic”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
The heart shape was also used in images to illustrate the Sacred heart in association with nuns’ spirituality, according to Thomas Dale, medieval studies expert and professor of art history at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Photo slideshow
Harbison is expected to be at the MSO concerts, and will teach a master class in composition at UW-Madison on Feb. 18, a day after the premiere of his new Viola Sonata with Chisholm in Mills Hall. Memorial Library is also hosting an exhibit through the month looking at his career.
The first time Jim Leary was nominated for a Grammy, it went to Joni Mitchell. This time around, Joni isn’t part of the competition, though an homage to Bob Dylan is probably a crowd-pleasing favorite. Even so, who says there isn’t time to throw some Grammy love at yodelers? That’s the hope of Leary, a folklorist who is up for his second Grammy Award nomination for Best Album Notes for a release of archival music with a Wisconsin connection.
Indeed, Barry’s works are staples of comics studies courses and fixtures in my own personal comic library. With flamboyantly chaotic artwork that quickly destabilizes reader’s expectations, Barry continues to revolutionize how we think about comics as a medium for self-expression. The University of Wisconsin-Madison professor uses comics as a tool for discovery.
The first time Jim Leary was nominated for a Grammy, it went to Joni Mitchell. This time around, Joni isn’t part of the competition, though an homage to Bob Dylan is probably a crowd-pleasing favorite. Even so, who says there isn’t time to throw some Grammy love at yodelers? That’s the hope of Leary, a folklorist who is up for his second Grammy Award nomination for Best Album Notes for a release of archival music with a Wisconsin connection.
McDaniel’s book is impressive because it uses one hand gesture to showcase a wide range of feelings and scenarios. It humanizes the black girl experience, a rare thing for children’s literature. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a research library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, found that only 340 of the 3,700 books it received in 2017 from U.S. publishers had “significant African or African American content/characters.”
Noted: The University of Wisconsin–Madison will be honoring Harbison throughout February. An exhibit on display all month at the Memorial Library will focus on Harbison and his career. The first performance of Harbison’s music will be of “Wind Quintet” by the Imani Winds, Feb. 1 at the Union Theater. And Harbison will take up a one-week residency at UW–Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music to coach students in composition.
Noted: Fred Stonehouse says he has a privileged view of Wisconsin politics. He lives in a working class and deeply red neighborhood in Slinger, teaches art in the “leftie bubble” of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and considers himself “a Milwaukee guy,” he says. Like a lot of artists, he leans left, but he’s hip deep in conservative circles too, including family and the monied collectors who buy his work. It’s one of the reasons his subtext is subtle.
Good photos tell compelling stories of the people, places and actions they capture. Southern Rites, photographer Gillian Laub’s chronicle of modern-day segregation in Mount Vernon, Georgia, succeeds in all categories.
Noted: James Kreul, founder and curator of Mills Folly Microcinema (and an Isthmus contributor), was also inspired by Kuchar, whom he met while attending UW-Madison. “Meeting George was a transformative moment for me, and began my journey exploring experimental film and video art,” says Kreul.
Noted: Simms is the editor of Settlin’: Stories of Madison’s Early African American Families, a collection of oral histories published late last year by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Simms, 74, grew up in Madison, attending the city’s public schools and later UW-Madison, where she received three degrees, most recently a doctorate in educational administration. She is 15 years younger than her sister, Delores Simms Greene, whose oral history is included in the collection. The age gap proved pivotal to how their respective lives unfolded.
The acknowledgement came at the end of the State of the State address.
Dr. Robinson’s life-long commitment to supporting students with dyslexia is not just professional. It is also very personal. He was unable to read until he turned 18.
Chi-Chi and Dr. Leckrone were the keynote speakers of the evening, but the stage was shared with many prominent local sports personalities including coaches from the Wisconsin Herd, Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, Green Bay Gamblers, UW-Madison Basketball team, including Alondo Tucker, and UW-Green Bay.
Mike Leckrone is in the area to be recognized with the 2019 Red Smith Award, given each year to a person whose made a significant contribution to sports in the state.
Noted: The festival, which is backed by the University of Wisconsin, screens an average of 150 films per year over an eight-day span. The 2019 Wisconsin Film Festival is tentatively scheduled for April 4-11.
In 2002, five years after Gillian Laub graduated from UW-Madison, she started doing freelance photography for Spin magazine. At that time, a high school student in Montgomery County, Georgia, wrote the magazine begging someone to come tell the story of her town’s segregation.
Noted: On the contrary, two new companion pieces from Estanich titled “The Biggest Wail from the Bottom of my Heart” and “What Love Looks Like” enter uncharted territory for this decade-old company. Estanich — who splits his time between Chicago and Stevens Point, Wisc., where he is a professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin — approached this new work with a political bent, which, to my knowledge, he and this company have not done before. So, some of those oft-seen tendencies listed above anchor the evening, bringing some familiarity to the forefront and softening overt references to racial tension in America and, yes, even Donald Trump’s wall.
Conservationist Aldo Leopold, the author of A Sand County Almanac, and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were the pioneers of what today is called restoration ecology. The best-known restoration project at the UW Arboretum, Curtis Prairie, played a role in an Oscar-winning Disney documentary.
“How the End First Showed” (University of Wisconsin), by D.M. Aderibigbe, is a powerful testament to the women in his family — especially his grandmother and mother — who were abused for years by the men they loved.
Ms. Wisel is a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared or will appear in Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Tin House online and on the Boston subway as winner of the “Poetry on the T” contest.
From learning to read at 18 years old, to working as a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Dr. Shawn Anthony Robinson is working to make our community a better place for people with reading difficulties.
Noted: Hawley, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, holds a master of fine arts degree from UW-Madison.
The Midwest doesn’t get much film representation. We’ve got Fargo (1996), 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake, and my favorite of 2017, The Bye Bye Man. Wisconsinite Michael M. McGuire, who attended UW-Madison, adds another Midwestern entry with his first feature film, Aquarians. Shot in various locations throughout Marinette County and Menominee County, the movie succeeds at portraying the harsh Midwestern winter as the desolate, isolated wasteland that it is.
Noted: List includes “What We Were Promised” by Lucy Tan, who earned her master’s of fine arts degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Over the past two decades, historians and librarians have been archiving zines in the desire to expand our understanding of the medium, in spaces like the Main Zine Collection in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library, San Francisco Public Library’s Little Maga/Zine Collection, the Library Workers Zine Collection at the iSchool Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and many more.
Noted: Vying with Stockhausen for busiest Badger at the movies this year was Carrie Coon. The actress who got her start on stages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Madison-area theater played small but key roles in three movies in theaters this year, also very different: “Widows,” the sci-fi thriller “Kin” and “Avengers: Infinity War” (as one of Thanos’ minions).
It’s not often that folks in Madison pay attention to the happenings in Stevens Point, but this past month was different. Just 109.5 miles north of Madison, the leaders of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point made seismic waves that registered an 8.2 on the higher education Richter Scale. The aftershocks were surely felt on the Madison campus.
Noted: List includes The Soft Life by Bridget Talone. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison and is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.
Students in the University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students release “Fearless” edition of Curb Magazine.
He arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from Iowa in the 1970s to learn how to write fiction. He did, but it took a while. Just last year a New York publisher brought out Duncan’s first collection of short stories.
The artists call it “the glory hole.” It’s one of three furnaces essential for glassmaking, used to reheat glass while a piece is being worked on. On this late November day, inside the Glass Lab on North Frances Street, the glory hole is burning at 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit. The door is open and the inside glows a molten orange. Helen Lee, assistant professor of UW-Madison’s art glass program, stands next to it, holding a blowpipe with a partially-made goblet at the end of it.
