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Category: Arts & Humanities

Robert Plant surprises Madison record store with a visit

Wisconsin Public Radio

After about 20 minutes, Plant approached Manley again. He wanted to know what was playing over the store’s speakers. It was the 2023 LP “The Window” from Chicago indie group Ratboys.

Manley told WPR it was exciting to introduce a newer band — who had recently played on the nearby UW-Madison student union terrace — to “the biggest rockstar in the world.”

New Wisconsin Public Radio station honors late Executive Director Gene Purcell

Current

Wisconsin Public Radio is launching a new music station with call letters honoring Gene Purcell, Wisconsin Public Media’s late executive director.

WEPP, which will start broadcasting Thursday on 90.7 FM in Rice Lake, Wis., gets its call letters from Purcell’s given name, Eugene Patrick Purcell. He died due to injuries from a traffic crash in 2021 after more than a decade at the helm of the organizations behind Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin.

University of Wisconsin alum Jenn Tran is ‘The Bachelorette.’ Here’s when her season will premiere.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Back in March, University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Jenn Tran was announced as the next “Bachelorette” — the show’s first Asian American lead.

And now, we know when we’ll get to start seeing her love story unfold. The Season 21 premiere of “The Bachelorette” is at 7 p.m. CT July 8 on ABC, the network shared.

Vel R. Phillips was a woman of many firsts in Milwaukee

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Vel R. Phillips has been described by many as an icon, a trailblazer, a culture shifter, and a woman of many firsts.

The Milwaukee native and North Division High School graduate was the first Black woman to earn her degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, the first woman to be elected to Milwaukee’s Common Council, the first female judge in Milwaukee, and the first Black woman to win statewide office in Wisconsin, among dozens of other accomplishments.

National Nordic Museum Reveals A Nordic Utopia For 20th-Century African American Artists

Forbes

Anderson had been thinking about William H. Johnson (1901-1970) when Ethelene Whitmire, Chair and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spoke at the National Nordic Museum in 2019. The pair of museum professionals had much in common. Both were past American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellows, both Fulbright Fellows, both spent time at the University of Copenhagen.

A Madison birding program connects students with nature and neighbors

Wisconsin Public Radio

Trish O’Kane calls herself an “accidental birder.” After surviving Hurricane Katrina in 2005, O’Kane moved to Wisconsin with her husband to start a new chapter. She had spent years as a human rights journalist in Central America and was now setting her sights on a Ph.D. in environmental natural resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin cultures and their folk music get major honor from Library of Congress

Wisconsin State Journal

“It is the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive folksong field collection ever made for the Library of Congress,” said James P. Leary, professor emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies at UW-Madison. It reminds “us that we cannot fully grasp the richness of American roots music without recognizing the many peoples, tongues, and sounds that – whether past or present, from mainstream or margins, deservedly acknowledged or unjustly ignored – have always made America great.”

Rarely seen Rod Serling story, “First Squad, First Platoon,” draws upon his World War II service

ABC News

Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the 2015 book “Unknown Serling,” found the story while looking through Serling’s papers at the University of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had yet to start a family when he wrote “First Squad, First Platoon.” But he was already thinking about the next generation, including a dedication to his yet-unborn children urging them to remember “a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh” and “the hopeless emptiness of fatigue” were as much part of war as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.

Story by Rod Serling, Twilight Zone creator, published after 70 years

The Guardian

“I was writing a memoir, called As I Knew Him, My Dad, Rod Serling,” Anne Serling, one of two daughters, told the Guardian. “And another writer, Amy Boyle Johnston, who had been doing a lot of researching of my dad’s early work and wrote a book called Unknown Serling, sent me the story. She’d found it in the archives in Wisconsin,” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz,” Reviewed

The New Yorker

Living in shabby apartments with his younger brother and his perpetually unhappy mother, the preteen Schwartz turned to literature as an escape. He borrowed armfuls of books from the public library: O. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Alexandre Dumas. A three-dollar copy of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” sparked an interest in poetry, but he didn’t become serious about the craft until college. (Schwartz started at the University of Wisconsin but, lacking sufficient funds for out-of-state tuition, transferred to New York University, where he earned a degree in philosophy.)

WHAD-FM 90.7 will switch to classical music as part of Wisconsin Public Radio reshuffle

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“We have heard from Milwaukee listeners for years that they want us to bring classical music radio back to the city and this will do just that,” Marta Bechtol, executive director of the Educational Communications Board, said in a statement from WPR. The board operates WPR and PBS Wisconsin in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Choose your own journalism adventure: Teaching media literacy with ‘Headlines and High Water’

Wisconsin Life

We live in a time when fake news permeates social media feeds and partisan coverage blasts through some cable news channels. Teaching media literacy can help people wade through the disinformation and become critical news consumers. As Christina Lieffring tells us, a video game created by UW-Madison’s Field Day Labs aims to teach students to become more media literate and what it takes to be a journalist.

Voter enthusiasm, Popularity of online videos, Social connections

Wisconsin Public Radio

Nielsen data shows that the top streaming service on home televisions is not Netflix or Hulu but YouTube. UW–Madison media studies professors Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson weigh in on how the video social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok are becoming the top competition for the television and movie industries.

Dance is dwindling in Wisconsin’s public schools. Chell Parkins is trying to fix that.

Wisconsin State Journal

As the inaugural director of dance education at UW-Madison, Parkins, 51, is aiming to get more dance education into the state’s school systems and training the next generation of dance teachers.

Although UW-Madison has been a hub for this work for decades, dance in Wisconsin’s public schools is dwindling. In the 2020-21 school year, just 1,066 students were enrolled in dance classes in Wisconsin schools, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction

Richard Davis film looks at the teacher behind the jazz master

The Capital Times

Davis, who moved to Madison in 1977, never rested on his laurels, and didn’t talk much in interviews about a career that included collaborations with Sarah Vaughan, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen. Never one to look backwards, Davis preferred to look ahead. He loved to talk about his career in Madison as an educator, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who founded the Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists to inspire future generations of musicians.

Student podcast recognized by NPR, America’s hardest jobs, Research on daddy longlegs, Carbon neutral parks

Wisconsin Public Radio

A UW-Madison student tells us about his podcast on changing technology. Then, a Washington Post columnist and a member of the Milwaukee Fire Department talk about America’s hardest jobs. Then, we explore new research on daddy longlegs. Then, we discuss efforts to make national parks along Lake Superior carbon neutral.

Ceramic Artist Toshiko Takaezu Gets a Posthumous Reappraisal

The New York Times

The Noguchi retrospective — which will travel to the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Chazen Museum of Art, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Honolulu Museum of Art — includes about 200 works in ceramics as well as the artist’s paintings, weavings and bronze-cast sculptures.

4 must-read books on birding (and 2 bonus picks)

LA Times

But, shaken by the devastation she (Trish O’Kane) saw in New Orleans, O’Kane, in her mid-40s, decided to return to school for a PhD in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Enchanted by catbirds singing near her new home, she signed up for an ornithology class and became a regular at Warner Park, a recreation center and urban wildlife refuge.

Explore Wisconsin history through artifacts with PBS Wisconsin Education’s new ‘The Look Back’ collection

PBS Wisconsin

PBS Wisconsin Education announces the launch of a new education series called The Look Back, which explores eras from Wisconsin’s history through artifacts. The Look Back was made in collaboration with the Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries, UW–Madison’s Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, Wisconsin educators and learners, and museums around the state.

UW Glass Lab’s Helen Lee wins major art award, has exhibit at Arts + Literature Lab

Wisconsin State Journal

In her 2½-minute video “Amulet,” award-winning artist Helen Lee shows her own image morphing into that of her young daughter Cicada. Both are dressed in black and framed by a black background, reciting Zhuyin Fuhao, a Chinese phonetic alphabet used today, Lee says, only in Taiwan and by the Chinese diaspora.

Lee, an associate professor of art and head of the Glass Lab at UW-Madison, wears a delicate necklace in the video with a small charm made from jade. It’s from her grandmother, and something she wears every day.

Smith: On its 75th anniversary, lessons of “A Sand County Almanac” more relevant than ever

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Leopold, born in Iowa in 1887, received a forestry degree from Yale and began his professional career in 1909 with the U.S. Forest Service. In 1924 he became associate director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison and in 1933 the University of Wisconsin created a chair of game management for him. Leopold died in 1948 fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm. The property is now part of the Aldo Leopold Foundation near Baraboo.