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Category: Arts & Humanities

Honoring the legend

Isthmus

When Warrington Colescott died on Sept. 10, staff at the Chazen Museum of Art knew they had to do something. The 97-year-old teacher, satirist and printmaker was a giant, not only at UW-Madison but nationally.

UW-Madison marching band director nears end of career

GM Today

Nostalgia has laced much of Leckrone’s last football season: In the back of his mind and in his assistants’ and students’ minds is a ticking clock, counting down the days, the rehearsals, the games he has left.
“Every event, someone will say, ‘This is the last time you’re going to do that,'” Leckrone said.

Remembering Lenny

Isthmus

Noted: But fear not. The pianist will be Christopher Taylor, professor of piano at UW-Madison. Taylor, who is also a mathematician, has gained a reputation as one of America’s leading pianists by conquering some of the most complicated music on the planet.

At 75, jazz great Ben Sidran is looking back and enjoying his ‘third act’

2018 has been a year of looking back and lightening the load for Ben Sidran. He and his wife Judy were the instigators of The Madison Reunion on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, a celebration of the city’s pivotal role in the 1960s culture and social justice movements … He donated his archives to the UW-Madison Libraries, including almost 100 boxes of recordings, letters and photographs.

8 classic Hollywood comedies with Wisconsin ties

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: “Back to School:” Rodney Dangerfield plays Thornton Meloni, a wealthy businessman who heads to college as an adult in the 1986 comedy “Back to School.” Meloni attends Grand Lakes University, but the school is a stand-in for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where many of the scenes were filmed.

Free-flowing ideas: “Displaced Horizons” is a multimedia work based on a fascination with water

Isthmus

Noted: The project started after Lundberg read William Fulton’s 1997 book The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. The book details the early city’s critical need to seek water in other regions. “That opened my eyes to this huge re-engineering of water,” says Lundberg, who is studying at UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies while also pursuing a law degree. “I was fascinated by these gigantic systems that allow us to live and profit in these ways, but without seeing the infrastructure that make them happen.”

The Arb wins an Oscar: Well, it was back in ‘54, but it still matters

Isthmus

As UW Arboretum heads into the fall burn season, we rediscovered a piece sent to Isthmus by Thomas J. Straka, a forestry professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. While studying forestry at UW-Madison, Straka spent much time at the Arboretum and he wants our readers to know about the Arb’s role in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Vanishing Prairie (available at Amazon.com).

UW Odyssey Project’s “Night of the Living Humanities” a Unique and Fun Pre-Halloween Fundraiser

Madison365

If you ever wanted a chance to meet and chat with amazing historical figures like Maya Angelou, Duke Ellington, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Mahalia Jackson, Walt Whitman, Frida Kahlo, and Frederick Douglass, you will get your opportunity at the UW-Madison Odyssey Project’s 4th annual “Night of the Living Humanities” fundraiser this Thursday, Oct. 25, 5-7 p.m. at The University Club.

A New Biography of a Brilliant Playwright Who Died Too Young

New York Times

Noted: At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Lorraine studied painting and sculpture and acted in plays, she single-handedly integrated a women’s dorm. Early in her writing life, she was mentored by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. And yet next to nothing is broadly known about her life, beyond the facts that she was black and a woman and, maybe, that she was a communist and queer.

New Film Explores Innovate Work of UW First Wave Students

Madison 365

“This is the type of learning that will light a fire in you. You learn more from the burning in your throat than all the time spent in limbo.”

Those words help kick off “Hip Hop U,” a documentary detailing the rise of hip hop in a college academic setting that is now available on the Wisconsin Public Television website. Hip Hop U, which premiered two weeks ago, tells the story of a one-of-a-kind academic program offered at the University of Wisconsin.

Superstars and local luminaries: The Wisconsin Book Festival continues to burst out of its four-day confines

Isthmus

Noted: Among the dozens of authors scheduled to appear are several notable Wisconsin writers. They include journalist Stu Levitan, whose comprehensive narrative history, Madison in the Sixties, will be published in November; Madison Magazine columnist John Roach, whose second book of essays is titled While I Have Your Attention; and UW-Madison literature instructor Heather Swan, who wrote Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, a book about the honeybee population that won the 2018 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.

A towering legacy

Isthmus

He’s a renowned bassist with a wondrous resume in jazz, classical and rock; venerated UW-Madison professor; healer of racial injustice. Richard Davis has filled many vital roles in his 88 years. They’ll all be celebrated Oct. 11 at Overture’s Capitol Theater at a multimedia event titled Passing the Bass: A Global Tribute to Richard Davis.

Please don’t take Carrie Coon too seriously

Chicago Magazine

Noted: Coon didn’t shed her outdoorsy impulses while earning her master’s in acting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison or while apprenticing and acting for four years at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The current artistic director of the theater, Brenda DeVita, recalls that Coon could often be found lying on her back in the woods “just taking in the trees,” or swimming in the Wisconsin River. Onstage, Coon was “like a gazelle,” DeVita says. “She has an energy that fits the outdoors, that fits the space.”

Cambridge artist wins top state honor

Cambridge News

WRAP began at UW–Madison in 1940 to foster creativity in rural areas. Now part of Continuing Studies, WRAP partners with the nonprofit Wisconsin Regional Artists Association (WRAA) to showcase artists in rural and urban areas statewide.

An Artist Who Champions and Channels Female Voices

The New York Times

Ms. Coyne’s references to writers will be the focus of an exhibition in 2021 at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen, finds the sculptures “evocative in the way that great literature stays with you,” she said. “Petah’s work exposes private things without being explicit, these deep wells of memory and meaning and relationship.”

An Artist Who Champions and Channels Female Voices

New York Times

Noted: Ms. Coyne’s references to writers will be the focus of an exhibition in 2021 at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen, finds the sculptures “evocative in the way that great literature stays with you,” she said. “Petah’s work exposes private things without being explicit, these deep wells of memory and meaning and relationship.”

Warrington Colescott

WISC-TV 3

Noted: After two years as an instructor at Long Beach City College, Warrington came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a one-year appointment and stayed for the rest of his long teaching career. Serigraphy, that is, silk-screen prints, began to replace his paintings by the mid-1950s although water-colors were to remain essential as preliminary studies for his prints.

The Bucky we’ll miss

Tone Madison

It was all worth it. That is, the recently concluded Bucky On Parade program, aka a giant gauntlet of latter-day Hummel figurines, aka let’s decorate different versions of the same sculpture 85 whole times and place most of them within a few blocks of each other, but also put a real scary one all by its lonesome in Sun Prarie, was worth it because it gave us Visible Bucky.

Ben Sidran Looks Back on 4 Decades With Live Music Box Set, Shares ‘The Funkasaurus’

Billboard

Noted: The timing was certainly right, coming right after Sidran had compiled personal papers and artifacts for his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. “I had gone through all these tapes, so I knew what was there,” Sidran tells Billboard. “I knew where all the great stuff was, so it came together very quickly. I had literally hundreds of tracks to choose from. “