Category: Arts & Humanities

Roald Amundsen?s ?We?ve Been to the South Pole? tour is back, probably with the same glass lantern slides he showed lecture attendees here in 1913, when ?the eyes of the civilized world were in a sense turned on Madison.? Peggy Hager, senior lecturer in Norwegian at UW-Madison, said the university was offered the exhibit by the Norwegian embassy, which has placed the posters and accompanying large photos and text at Scandinavian cultural centers across the Midwest and Northwest. To accompany the exhibit, Hager arranged four lectures, ?Exploration from a Norwegian Perspective,? on explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the Vikings, the Sami, and Ice Cube, UW-Madison?s research station at the South Pole.

Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate Programs Damon Williams held a press conference Tuesday outlining the schedule for the 2012 Diversity Forum, which will take place Friday, Oct. 12. Lani Guinier, a civil rights attorney and Harvard Law School professor, will be the keynote speaker at the forum. Guinier will discuss the process and consequences of the affirmative action case to face the U.S. Supreme Court beginning in October.

Meg Hamel, who has been the Wisconsin Film Festival?s director and public face since 2007, will no longer serve in that position, UW Arts Institute officials said this week. The Institute, which runs the festival with the UW Department of Communication Arts, notified Hamel that she would no longer serve as director.

Forward Theater Company captures the energy and the skepticism of election season with ?44 Plays for 44 Presidents,? a clever, riotously entertaining production running through Oct. 7 in the Overture Center Playhouse.For 2 1/2 hours, a gifted cast of five actors wrestle, posture and shimmy their way through American history, abridged….Patrick Sims, an associate acting prof at UW-Madison, casts looks of mock astonishment at the audience, as if to make sure we?re in on the joke. It fits that the professor plays PhD-educated Woodrow Wilson, and gives ?A Lecture on Myself.?

The story of the Catonsville Nine ? a group of Catholic activists who entered a draft board office in Maryland in 1968 and burned some of their records ? may seem like an event mostly lost to the mists of history. There are no active draft boards deciding which young men should be compelled to enter the military. The kind of Catholic activism that dominates the news these days is bishops speaking out on abortion or gay marriage or birth control mandates. Yet in his compelling retelling of this dramatic event from the Vietnam era, author Shawn Peters has not only brought into sharp relief issues around the ethical limits of protest, he also has provided a thoughtful look at the religious roots of protests as current as this summer?s headlines.

Forty-five artworks traveling from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, will be featured in “Offering of the Angels: Painting and Tapestries from the Uffizi Gallery,” a historically important exhibition that opens Friday Aug. 24 at the Chazen Museum of Art, 750 University Ave. “It?s thrilling and a very rare opportunity to be able to show works of art from this period of such high quality ? and from the museum that is really at the foundation of our idea of museums,” said Chazen curator of paintings and sculpture Maria Saffiotti Dale, whose expertise is in Italian Renaissance art.

Jerry Apps started his career as a county extension agent in Green Lake and Brown counties in 1957, then moved on to work as publications editor in the State 4-H Office. Born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, Apps is now the author of more than 30 books, many of them on rural history and country life, and is an emeritus professor at UW-Madison. Apps suggested three books, one published in 2010, one in 1939, and one in 1854. ?I believe all three of them have much to say to us today,? he said.

Yiddish culture is experiencing a renaissance in ? of all places ? Madison. At its peak, Yiddish culture displayed incredible diversity in its music and literature, Henry Sapoznik told a crowd Sunday in his opening remarks at A Biselle (?A little bit of?) KlezKamp, a daylong program of Yiddish language, music, dance and arts on the UW-Madison campus. One of the great historical facts about Yiddish, not widely acknowledged, is that in 1916, UW-Madison was the first university in the world to offer a class on Yiddish language, said Sapoznik, director of the UW-Madison?s year-old Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, which put on KlezKamp.

Musicals are more than just jazz hands and tap dancing. But with the lighthearted qualities typically associated with the art form, it can be hard to avoid certain escapist tendencies. Music Theatre of Madison?s production of ?Parade,? which opens Thursday, July 26, is grounded in the dark reality of an important story. MTM has also partnered with the Jewish Federation of Madison for a special program on Sunday, July 29. The program will include a historical summary by Randolph and UW-Madison Jewish studies and theater professor Bob Skloot, as well as a talk by Matthew Bernstein, author of ?Screening A Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television,? before the evening?s show.

James Danky, a faculty associate in journalism at UW-Madison and an expert on minority communities and the press, said Our Lives has several things going for it despite the sour publishing climate. It is a free-distribution, niche publication at a time when subscription-based, general-interest magazines such as Newsweek are foundering. Its target audience has considerable discretionary income, a draw for advertisers.

The summer after Paul Rowe joined the faculty at UW-Madison?s School of Music, something felt amiss. ?In July, the building was totally lit, the air conditioning was on, and nothing was going on,? he said. For a building meant for music-making, the whole place was eerily silent. Why not fill it, he thought, with musicians who shared his passion for early music? Rowe?s wife, singer Cheryl Bensman-Rowe, and music professor Chelcy Bowles, UW-Madison?s director of continuing education in music, agreed. By 2000, the three had founded the Madison Early Music Festival, filling early July with sound.

People know me as: Stephanie Jutt, professional flutist, principal flute in Madison Symphony, professor at UW-Madison School of Music, and artistic director of Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society (BDDS).