Category: Arts & Humanities

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.

With her long braids, oversized glasses and off-kilter wit, Lynda Barry ? the groundbreaking cartoonist, creative spark and yes, Wisconsin farm girl ? is not hard to spot on the UW-Madison campus. The university?s 2012 Spring Artist in Residence, Barry is packing lecture halls and filling up Madison workshops designed to help participants dig out creativity buried since childhood. When her spring semester course ?What It Is: Manually Shifting the Image,? was announced, 92 people applied for 24 slots.

Anthony Shadid had dozens of bylines in the Wisconsin State Journal during his time with the Associated Press in Milwaukee in the early 1990s. But in April 2002, Shadid?s name appeared in the State Journal not as a byline, but as the subject of a story. It was an indication of the life he chose and the distance his talent took him.

One of these years the Wisconsin Film Festival should invite Joe McBride back to town to tell stories of the glory days of film on the UW-Madison campus, as well as what happened to him later when he went Hollywood.

An arts festival designed to highlight creative works that came out of the 2011 ?Wisconsin Uprising? is on again. Last week, the Cap Times reported that an ?Art in Protest? event was called off after the office of Rep. Steve Nass, R-Town of La Grange, got wind of it. That festival was being sponsored by UW-Extension?s School for Workers and originally was scheduled for March 29-31 at the Pyle Center on the UW-Madison

One of these years the Wisconsin Film Festival should invite Joe McBride back to town to tell stories of the glory days of film on the UW-Madison campus, as well as what happened to him later when he went Hollywood. In fact, why not this year?….Originally from Wauwatosa, in September 1966 McBride was taking a beginning film class taught by charismatic UW-Madison professor Richard Byrne. ?Kane? was screened one day in class, and the young McBride was blown away.

There will be some changes behind the scenes at this year?s Wisconsin Film Festival.

Alumni and friends of Anthony Shadid have established a memorial fund in his honor, UW-Madison announced. Shadid, the 1990 graduate of UW-Madison who went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting in the Middle East, died last week from an apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria for the New York Times. He was 43 years old.

Anthony Shadid learned the skills of a journalist at the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated in 1990. But the New York Times reporter, who died this week from an apparent asthma attack while covering the ongoing violence in Syria, chose to cover the Middle East because of an interest with the region nurtured by his Lebanese-American family.

Madison native and former Monona High School teacher Gayle Weitz comes from a family of animal lovers. Her research into animal/human interfaces led to the creation of “Humanimals,” a thought-provoking and witty series of people-sized functional sculptural cabinets now showing at Memorial Union.