Category: Arts & Humanities

John Baldacchino will be the next director of the Arts Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He comes from the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he was chair of arts education at the School of Education and Social Work. He will take over his new role in August.

No one expected Back to School to be a hit. But the Rodney Dangerfield comedy—which saw the legendary comedian starring as Thornton Melon, a self-made millionaire who attends Grand Lakes University with his son, Jason, and becomes the most popular man on campus—ended up becoming the second highest-grossing comedy of 1986 (only Crocodile Dundee made more). To celebrate its 30th anniversary, here are some facts about the only film that ever dared to pair Dangerfield with Robert Downey Jr., Sam Kinison, and Kurt Vonnegut.

New York or L.A. (or Wisconsin)? Stanislavski or Meisner (or Disney)? Picking an acting school can be a Hamlet-like melodrama all its own, as THR surveys the experts to rank the best places to get a graduate degree. UW is ranked #24th.

Participants in the Odyssey Project share their original works of short poetry.

I was travelling last month and returned home to the news that Karl Schmidt had died, “peacefully at home,” according to the obituary, on April 21, at 93.

Frances Myers was a perfect match for printmaking: hard-working, innovative, assertive, complex.But the artist and retired UW-Madison art professor, who died unexpectedly in December 2014 of a stroke at age 78, was also known for other attributes. Kindness. A sense of spirituality. An ability to find depth in the commonplace.

Over the next 18 months, five cities around the world will present parts of “Out of the Shadows,” a wide-ranging selection of cabaret, chamber music, choral music, theater and literature from Jewish artists, most of them emigres and many affected by the Holocaust. In Madison, it’s happening now.

Noted: “Hoodwinked: An Installation by Jay Katelansky,” which runs through May 29 at the Chazen Museum of Art, is striking in its impact. Katelansky is a third-year MFA student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and this installation was the result of her winning the 2016 Chazen Museum Prize to an Outstanding MFA Student.

Also: The topic of criminality gets simultaneously broadened and dissected in “Criminal,” an exhibition on the first floor of Overture Galleries. UW–Madison students, recent graduates and faculty probe the inherent conflicts in the concept and what influences and motivates understanding of it.

UW-Madison design studies professor Jennifer Angus’ large-scale artwork titled “In the Midnight Garden,” along with installations by eight other nationally known artists, has taken the U.S. capital by storm in the show “WONDER” at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. “WONDER” was expected to draw 200,000 people during its six-month run — but that estimate has been upped to 500,000, Angus said. Huge lines of visitors snake through the museum on most days.

It’s become a routine feature of the Asian American poet’s life: waking up to your inbox full of messages asking, “Have you seen this?” And it’s never good. A few months ago, it was the news that a white poet had published a poem in The Best American Poetry while masquerading under the name “Yi-Fen Chou.” This week, it was a poem in The New Yorker by Calvin Trillin titled “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?”, a bit of light verse ostensibly poking fun at foodies chasing the latest Chinese regional cuisine. But when I read the poem, I got a sick feeling—the feeling you get when you are the butt of a joke. Trillin’s poem comes out of a long tradition of white writers praising Chinese culture while ignoring Chinese people.

UW-Madison students of color are channeling their frustration over racism on campus into a multimedia visual and performing arts showcase at the Chazen Museum.

Amy Franceschini, a California-based social practice artist who founded a group called Futurefarmers in 1995 to explore alternate farming methods, is finishing up a semester residency in Madison as the Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence sponsored by the UW-Madison Arts Institute.

At Madison East High School, students in Amy Isensee’s classroom are considering what they have in common with 17th-century Chinese culture

Hwang comes to Madison on April 20 for a Center for the Humanities lecture in the Elvehjem Building, connected to the Chazen Museum of Art.

A century of Yiddish education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be celebrated with live and historic music, including the first event in an international Jewish performance series.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s band is known throughout the country and the world.

On Monday, UW Band Director Mike Leckrone stopped by Wake Up Wisconsin to talk about the upcoming show.

(Video) UW Band Director Mike Leckrone previews the band’s 42nd spring concert.

Luckily, a computer program has swooped in to save Stokes and his sense of humor. With the help of computer scientists from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, The New Yorker for the first time is using crowdsourcing algorithms to uncover the top captions. The magazine quietly started using the algorithms a few months ago, testing them out on past caption contest winners and finalists. On Wednesday, The New Yorker revealed the tool publicly and is now inviting all of us to vote for our favorite captions.

While Madison has lately been gripped by basketball fever, one Badger has already won a competition that rivals any NCAA tournament. Former University of Wisconsin-Madison student Nicole Rocklin received an Oscar for producing Spotlight, named the best picture of 2015 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

For reporting on the use of slave labor in the Southeast Asian fishing industry, the Associated Press will receive the 2016 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.

Add this to the ever-growing list of outdoor music events you must attend: carillon concerts. A University of Wisconsin–Madison tradition since the bell tower was erected in 1936, on Bascom Hill overlooking Lake Mendota at 1160 Observatory Dr., the concerts are held regularly on Sunday afternoons throughout the year (the current series runs through May 1, with performances starting at 3 p.m.). And the musician responsible for wrangling more than 50 bells into a melodious sound? Lyle Anderson, who was appointed University Carilloner in 1986.

“Transformations,” opened Friday in Music Hall on the UW-Madison campus and runs again Tuesday.

The 27th annual institute, April 15-17, is hosted by UW-Madison Continuing Studies, which strives to represent the Wisconsin Idea, said Laurie Scheer, conference director and a faculty member in the Continuing Studies Writing Department.