Category: Arts & Humanities

A woman claims in court that a University of Wisconsin art history professor agreed to store her Grant Wood painting “Sultry Night” at the school?s art museum – then put it up for auction.

Young and old voices combine for a commanding sound that fills the room during a recent Thursday night rehearsal. Singers stand for the last piece and sway ? mostly in unison ? during the chorus. After the last note is sung, chairs are pushed back and tables are soon crowded with beer bottles and plates of sausage and Limburger cheese. Meet the Madison Maennerchor, the city?s German men?s choir, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this year.

If all the world?s a stage, a Madison theatrical continent is about to slip off the globe. The Wisconsin Union Theater will close this summer for two years of renovation and remodeling.

All the action this weekend is at the Wisconsin Film Festival, which takes place in eight venues around town, including the UW-Cinematheque, Union South, and two screens in Sundance Cinemas. So nothing else going on there.

Nick Offerman knows how to make an entrance. The ?Parks & Recreation? star had to start his show at the Wisconsin Union Theater late Wednesday night because so much of the audience was stuck in a seemingly endless will-call line.

Dear Editor: A new documentary film about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, ?A Noble Lie ? Oklahoma City, 1995,? will be featured Thursday, April 19, in the Humanities Building, Room 1111, 455 N. Park Street on the UW-Madison campus. Admission is free.

When musing about the Edible Book Festival, it?s hard not to say ?Eat Those Words!? The annual festival, held April 10 at the UW-Madison?s Memorial Library as part of National Library Week, was a visual delight, but not meant to be eaten. Instead, the cupcakes, pies, cakes, breads, veggies, fruit, crackers and frosting (lots of frosting) depicted the creators? favorite tomes, signifying a book?s title or a moment taken from within the hard tack covers.

The photograph grabs you immediately. Much of the frame is in darkness, and on the left side, what looks like an IV drip is out of focus. In the lower right-hand corner, in a patch of light, a woman in obvious pain grips the shoulders of a man. Titled “Too Much,” that one photo is among hundreds of thousands that professional photographer Lexia Frank, a Hillsboro native and UW-Madison graduate, has taken in her career. But that one photo has taken her places she never expected to go.

e University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to honor two Spanish literary masterpieces and a critic who wrote key reviews of the texts at a symposium later this month.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to honor two Spanish literary masterpieces and a critic who wrote key reviews of the texts at a symposium later this month.

For now, if you want to buy tickets for the 2012 Wisconsin Film Festival, you?ll have to do so in person at the UW Memorial Union. The festival?s new online ticketing system was taken offline Sunday afternoon, the day after tickets went on sale, after numerous reports of problems by customers.

Ted DeDee didn?t know it at the time, but a puppet show he saw in third grade would change his life. Paul Beard, a Wisconsin native and UW-Madison grad who just helped open the $470 million Smith Center for the performing arts in Las Vegas, called DeDee’s task at Overture “no small challenge,” but one he’s prepared for.

This is the Year of Glass. From Wausau and Newark, N.J., to Sacramento, Calif., and Kalamazoo, Mich., scores of museums are honoring the 50th anniversary of studio glass, a transcendent art form that is powerfully malleable, notoriously fragile and stunningly young. And it was born here. “You have to remember that when Harvey Littleton started this in 1962, there were no art galleries carrying glass. There were no collectors buying glass. That world has exploded,” said Michael Monroe, guest curator for Madison’s upcoming tribute to the studio glass movement titled “Spark and Flame: 50 Years of Art Glass and the UW-Madison,” which opens April 21 at the Chazen Museum of Art.

A Madison artist who creates complex and vividly colored paper sculptures has been selected to represent Dane County in a European event that attracts a global audience.

The Pro Arte Quartet concert Saturday night in the Wisconsin Union Theater was among the most poignant of this year?s centennial performances. According to Union Theater director Ralph Russo, an early iteration of the Pro Arte helped open the theater 73 years ago, at a spring arts festival. (The theater will soon close for a two-year renovation, set to be complete in fall 2014.) After a discussion with guest composer William Bolcom and New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, the concert itself opened with a dedication to violist James Crow.

The time is ripe for con artists on Madison stages. At the Bartell Theatre, Alexa Vere de Vere stalks young artists on the brink of fame, flattering and robbing them in OUT!Cast Theatre?s ?As Bees in Honey Drown.? Alexa?s predecessor, the great seducer himself, is at work a mile further east on the UW-Madison campus. Don Giovanni leers and laughs like a frat boy from the Music Hall stage in University Opera?s spring production, which runs once more on Tuesday night with an alternate cast.

On Saturday night, all of Madison is invited to Union Theater to hear ? free of charge ? the world premiere of composer William Bolcom?s Piano Quintet No. 2. The celebrated Bolcom wrote the piece as a commission for the Pro Arte Quartet, the UW-Madison-based string quartet that turns 100 years old this year, making it perhaps the oldest continuously performing quartet in the world.

It was 1975. A group of three met in New York City?s West 39th Street Garment District. In a relic of a bar, two men and one woman sat around a table. First, a successful business executive, Jerome Chazen. Next, Chazen?s former roommate, Art Ortenberg ? back from university days they spent together in Wisconsin. The third was a woman. A designer by the name of Liz Claiborne. Together, the three hatched a plan.

?They were hell-bent on tearing down an institution.?
?I felt the ground shake. I had no idea what was going on.?
?As we approached University, we began to see debris.?

The stories of those affected when a bomb exploded outside of Sterling Hall on Aug. 24, 1970, killing one person and injuring three others, provide the basis for ?Uncivil Disobedience,? a play-in-progress by Mike Lawler and shared with the public Friday evening as a staged reading at the Overture Center.

?Ossuary,? pronounced ?osh-oo-er-ee,? is a noun meaning repository of bones. It?s also the title of a project by UW-Madison art professor Laurie Beth Clark on view in the Garfield Gallery at the Chazen Museum of Art. Clark invited hundreds of artists to create bones or an artwork that is inspired by, uses, or plays with the idea of bones. The result is a collection of intriguing, unexpected and varied works.

I ran into Rick Brooks recently and, not surprisingly, talk soon turned to Little Free Library — the project he co-founded that places small boxes offering free books in places where people will find them….?We?re now in 34 states and 17 countries,? says Brooks, an outreach manager with UW-Madison?s Division of Continuing Studies who, with a handful of other volunteers, runs Little Free Library.