Category: Arts & Humanities

We know science is booming at UW-Madison. Less heralded publicly, perhaps, are the arts. But if science is the big dog on campus, then the arts are like a terrier, a steady companion over the years, now barking for attention. Enter The Year of the Arts. A brainchild of former Chancellor John Wiley, he wanted to point the spotlight on arts and humanities on campus. Last year, the university declared it the Year of Humanities. This year, it?s time for the arts to shine. So, appropriately, the theme for The Year of the Arts is ?Illuminate.?

Mildred Fish-Harnack, a Wisconsin-born scholar who is considered a heroine in Eastern Europe because of her efforts leading Nazi resistance in Germany during World War II.

Mildred Fish-Harnack is a woman WISC-TV has profiled before. The Wisconsin-born scholar is considered a heroine in Eastern Europe, leading a Nazi resistance effort that saved lives. She was one of the only Americans executed in Nazi Germany during the war. Now her efforts with the resistance group, the Red Orchestra, are part of an on campus exhibit by Franz Rudolph Knubel open through December 1.

Noted: It?s All in the Preparation: Contents from the New York-based Terese and Alvin S. Lane Collection, which includes 250 drawings and over 70 sculptures by Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Picasso, among other artists, has been donated to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the collection will serve as an educational tool, emphasizing the mysterious nature of the artistic process through an emphasis on preparatory drawings.

Emma Vasseur said she hears the question all the time: ?How did you get that gig?? After all, it?s not every UW-Madison student who goes directly from graduation into a job touring with one of the world?s biggest folk music icons. Since she graduated in May 2009, Vasseur has worked as the personal assistant and guitar technician for singer Joan Baez, traveling all across the United States and Europe. This Friday, she returns to campus when Baez plays at the Union Theater, 800 Langdon St.

Bryan Krull is not a musician. A University of Wisconsin graduate and recent publisher of the historical fiction 1920?s delta blues novel ?Lil? Choo-Choo Johnson Bluesman,? Krull literally cannot carry a tune. ?People ask me all the time if I play in a band or if I?m a skilled guitarist because I wrote a novel about blues musicians,? Krull saidl. ?I can?t. I think it?s because I was assigned the clarinet in middle school.?

Build. Explore. Discover. It?s Family Day at the UW Arboretum this Sunday, Sept. 26. Also, the world comes to Madison this weekend for the 7th Annual Madison World Music Festival, bringing in musicians from around the world. The Thursday and Friday events take place at the UW Memorial Union.

Go to most music festivals, like Lollapalooza or Bonnaroo, and it?s helpful to bring along a schedule and a map. For the Madison World Music Festival, you might want to bring an atlas, too. The three-day festival, which takes place Thursday and Friday at the UW Memorial Union Terrace and Saturday at the Willy Street Fair, brings together musicians from Mexico, Romania, Kenya, Mali, Kyrgyzstan, Corsica and many more.

Should you find yourself perusing the castaway Web sites for CBS?s new ?Survivor: Nicaragua? (because why wouldn?t you?), you might come across the page for 30 year-old Matthew ?Sash? Lenahan.

The Madison area has a new dance company that grew out of an unlikely place ? the baseball diamond of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Ashley Grantin and Sara Willcutt-Rohs, the leaders of the new Madison Contemporary Vision Dance, met a year-and-a-half ago while performing with the Brewers? Diamond Dancers. More than ?just? cheerleading, the dance team performs before and after games, and during the 7th inning stretch.

(Grantin is assistant director in charge of dance for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Spirit Squad)

The first show in the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s University Theatre season is at once typical in its depiction of a new relationship and an inventive new allegory about love. ?Across A Distance,? inspired by the friendship between Julia Faulkner, a faculty member in the UW-Madison School of Music, and Robert Schleifer, a professional deaf actor from Chicago, opens on Friday, Sept. 17, at the Mitchell Theatre in Vilas Hall.

With at least two concerts every week this fall, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music is offering everything from solo recitals to newly minted trios and visiting quartets.

Film and performance-makers Helen Paris and Leslie Hill will be artists-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall 2011. This photo is from a performance of the moment i saw you i knew i could love you.

Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

With at least two concerts every week this fall, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music is offering everything from solo recitals to newly minted trios and visiting quartets.

All of a sudden there is a flurry of interest in Harry Weese, who designed the most controversial building in Madison history. Weese, a colorful Chicago architect who designed the George L. Mosse Humanities Building on the UW-Madison campus, and who died in 1998, is the subject of a long profile in the July issue of Chicago magazine.

A new book on Weese and his work, ?The Architecture of Harry Weese,? which includes a photo and text on Humanities, is coming in September. The author, Chicago academic Robert Bruegmann, will speak on changing tastes in architecture at Monona Terrace Oct. 7. His lecture is titled, ?Buildings We Love to Hate.?

The next day in Madison, Bruegmann will speak on campus ? the details are still to be finalized ? more specifically on Weese and the Humanities Building.

Christopher Taylor is the overpopulation pianist. He has a common name, which means he has a lot of company on Internet searches. His handful of obscure, independent recordings have such amateurish graphics that he would be easy to dismiss as a home hobbyist.

Like many leading ladies, Molly Spivey got her start in the ensemble. Luckily, that was an ensemble with the Madison Savoyards, Madison?s summer-centered community theater that produces Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. This year, Spivey, 22, plays “little” Buttercup, the mezzo soprano principal in “Pinafore.” It is her first Savoyards lead.

A free exhibit at the Dane County Regional Airport features work done by artists from all over the world with developmental disabilities.

A free exhibit at the Dane County Regional Airport features work done by artists from all over the world with developmental disabilities. The exhibit features 65 artworks in different media. The selected works are from a collection that?s grown over the last 34 years to 150 pieces altogether and usually hangs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Waisman Center.

Islands frontman Nick Thorburn probably gets a lot of questions about when his old band, The Unicorns, is getting back together. But the crowd assembled at the Memorial Union Terrace on Saturday night seemed more interested in when his current band was going to stop playing songs off last year?s Vapours and start playing some off 2006?s Return To The Sea.

The UW-Madison dance department?s fourth annual Summer Dance Institute is truly an international affair, with instructors and choreographers from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany and Australia, and dance students from Australia, Taiwan and the U.S. This three-week institute culminated Friday night in a free performance at Lathrop Hall?s cool and comfortable Margaret H?Doubler performance space. For the most part, this cultural cross-pollination yielded great results.

Imagine if a group of musicians decided to have a festival covering English-language music of the last 400 or so years. Critics likely would contend they were crazy to try to cover such a broad spectrum of music.

The recent challenge by a Cameroonian writer and literary critic, Peter Wuteh Vakunta of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America (USA) against the most published postulation of foremost Kenyan writer and apostle of indigenous language, Ngugi Wa Thiong?o, on strong recommendation of writing literature in indigenous language, is a clear indication that there is need for global writers to readdress the claim.

A charming exhibit of the Memorial Union?s historic silk-screened posters is on display this summer.The elegant hand-made posters, dating at least as far back as 1950, were created in the Union?s art lab, the Craftshop. They were saved by a former Craftshop director, the late Elliot Starks.

Dear Editor: Colombia Support Network is pleased to announce a film series co-sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean & Iberian Studies Program that will begin Thursday, July 1, at 6:30 p.m. in 336 Ingraham Hall (1155 Observatory Drive) on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

This series introduces the subject of Colombia by presenting all sides of the country: environment, drugs, political history (Plan Colombia), youth, political violence (the Patriotic Union), forced displacement and more.

Arriving in 1947 from California as a painter to a dysfunctional art department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Warrington Colescott soon became part of an outstanding group of young printmakers who revamped the department. With colleagues such as Alfred Sessler, Dean Meeker, Ray Gloeckler and William Weege, he experimented and entered print shows across the country. Made in multiples and easily shipped to exhibitions around the country, his prints raised his profile to the point where the big curators on the coastsâ??and abroadâ??took notice.

Robin Zimmermann has quietly been making inroads into Boiseâ??s music scene for years; so quietly — as is her nature — that her name is still unfamiliar to many of her peers. Zimmermann started her musical journey as a child, at the Wausau Conservatory of Music in Wisconsin, where she grew up. She focused on piano and by the time she reached the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she had burned out on the black and white keys, she says. So, she turned to voice and flute.

In its Summer Dance Festival, presented over the weekend at UW-Madisonâ??s Lathrop Hall, Li Chiao-Ping Dance strove to feature people of various ages and abilities â??dancing through life.â? The concertâ??s seven works, three of which were premieres, did just that. On stage were children through senior citizens and professional dancers moving alongside community members who had little or no previous dance training.

This is a story about two guys who met on a game show in California, lost touch, came to Madison without the other knowing, reconnected, and are now collaborating on a play about a game show.Itâ??s called â??The Game Show Show.â? Students of Madison history will immediately recall that one of the most notorious plays ever staged in this city was called â??The Game Show,â? although the new production does not draw inspiration from its predecessor. Dennis Gordon was a UW-Madison graduate student from Chicago when he mounted â??The Game Showâ? at the Union in 1968.

Itâ??s sundown on a beautiful Monday night on the Memorial Union Terrace, and patrons are gathered around tables, pouring each other plastic cups of beer and laughing. But many of them arenâ??t looking at the orange-pink sky above or the silvery expanse of Lake Mendota, or doing the usual people-watching sport of a summertime Terrace night.

Instead, their attention is focused on a screen set up on the Terraceâ??s covered music stage, where Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy are giving Principal Vernon (â??You just bought yourself another Saturday, pal!â?) a hard time in the seminal 1985 teen flick â??The Breakfast Club.â? Welcome to Lakeside Cinema, a Monday night ritual on the Terrace for at least 30 years.

For a musical ensemble with a famous name, legacy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a storied name can grab attention. On the other, an illustrious history can be burdensome when it sets up expectations that are difficult to live up to. The Pro Arte Quartet, which performed at Weill Recital Hall on Wednesday evening, is presumably acquainted with both sides of the issue.

When violist Sally Chisholm started playing with the Pro Arte Quartet nearly 20 years ago, she looked at her music and noticed the markings of the musicians that had come before.

â??I told Parry (Karp, the cellist), Iâ??m hesitant to erase anything in my part,â? Chisholm said. â??He said, â??No, no, no. We start anew each day. You take a fresh look at everything. You want to honor history, but you want to make new history every day.â??â?

Pro Arte has been the quartet in residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 70 years.

Madison will become the Yiddish cultural center of the Midwest, if a Boston philanthropist has anything to say about it. Brian Bull reports. (Audio.)

Donâ??t let the title mislead: Gallery Night isnâ??t just for galleries. Instead, the twice-annual event, coming up Friday, May 7, encompasses a variety of venues as well as artistic media. With 65 locations and many more artists, this will be the largest Gallery Night yet. A sculptor, Crystal Chesnik, is installing her work in the Red Gym on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Two formidable Madison theater companies — one a mainstay, one barely a year old — have issued the lineups for their 2010-2011 seasons. University Theatre and Forward Theater Company have packed their schedules with classics, comedy, cross-dressing, and highbrow aaahhht. Oh, and a giant vibrator.

Donâ??t let the title mislead: Gallery Night isnâ??t just for galleries.

Instead, the twice-annual event, coming up Friday, May 7, encompasses a variety of venues as well as artistic media. With 65 locations and many more artists, this will be the largest Gallery Night yet.

A sculptor, Crystal Chesnik, is installing her work in the Red Gym on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.