Q. Can you share with us the designer/artist of the glass art along the walkways in the Kohl Center? Do you have any other details about it?
A. The stunning, nearly 50-yard-long glass structure is called â??The Mendota Wall.â? It was installed, about 18 feet above the floor, just before the Kohl Center opened on Jan. 17, 1998.
The recording industry has settled a lawsuit against a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point student accused of illegally downloading songs from the Internet.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University released its schedule for the 2009-2010 season, and it includes an eclectic range of production from around the world.
Audiences will see plays that bring cultural experiences and enduring questions to the stage from generations of playwrights from France, Spain and Norway. There is also a trip planned to Beaverland, Japan, and an enchanted forest.
“Being Bucky” is a tough ticket no more.
The documentary, which was named the Audience Winner last spring at the Wisconsin Film Festival, just came to DVD. It chronicles a year in the life of the seven students who put on the Bucky Badger suit and represent the University of Wisconsin-Madison at functions throughout the state.
The Office of Multicultural Initiatives (OMAI) at UW-Madison capped off its fourth annual Spoken Word & Hip-Hop Educator’s Institute with what could only be described as an interdisciplinary arts loverâ??s dream at the Wisconsin Historical Society on Friday night.
Atop a broad auditorium stage, the next generationâ??s spoken word gurus belted their beats to an appreciative and hyped up crowd of at least 100 aficionados. Featured performers were New York poets Marne Bruckner and Jasmine Mans, both incoming freshman to the UWâ??s First Wave artists program.
Recent UW-Madison chool of Music graduate Ben Luedcke was figuring out how to balance his summer lawn-mowing business in Milwaukee with his directorship of a Madison church choir when he heard the news: The universityâ??s longtime summer vocal ensemble had been nixed.
Long for the melancholy tune of the lute or the majestic sound of the sackbut?
A weeklong festival featuring early music will be held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus starting Saturday.
Care to learn the lute? Always dreamt of playing the krumhorn? Hoping to polish up your recorder skills or master a few madrigals?
Aspiring musicians and Renaissance enthusiasts can enjoy and practice the music of the 15th through 17th centuries for a full week at the upcoming Madison Early Music Festival (MEMF), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month and begins Saturday, July 11.
“It’s really nice,” says Verona (Maya Rudolph) in the movie “Away We Go,” as she and her partner Burt (John Krasinski) tour what’s supposed to be the UW-Madison campus. (It’s actually some college in Connecticut standing in for the UW).
Patrick Goldstein
Los Angeles Times
HOLLYWOOD — Hollywood is full of filmmakers who are uncompromising perfectionists, but only Michael Mann could boast that he not only has a favorite room to screen his films — the Zanuck theater on the Fox lot — but also a favorite row in the theater where he thinks you should park your fanny for the optimal viewing experience.
“Public Enemies” director Michael Mann was born and raised in Chicago. But he came of age while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1961 to 1965.
“I wanted to attend a great liberal arts school, but I wasn’t uninfluenced by the physical beauty of the place,” said Mann in a recent interview.
From beavers to bad parents, thunder gods to Cinderella, the new University Theatre season is populated with unusual characters from all over the world.
UW-Madison’s producing theater, housed in two stages in Vilas Hall, hopes to educate as well as please audiences, and the upcoming 2009-10 season contains ample opportunities for both.
“We’re really going all over the place for this season,” said new University Theatre director David Furumoto. Furumoto replaces Tony Simotes, who left to head Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts.
If the UW-Cinematheque’s free film series during the school year seems kind of eclectic, mixing together, say, the work of a world auteur like Jean-Luc Godard with a series of ’50s melodramas about social issues, the summer series is even more offbeat. It’s only four weeks long, and feels like kind of a vacation from a programming perspective, mixing the traditional African film series the C’tek plays every summer with some other lighter, weirder stuff.
The musical rings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 56-bell Memorial Carillon will resonate throughout the campus more often this summer with two recital series and a Fourth of July program performed by Lyle Anderson.
Anderson succeeded John Wright Harvey as University Carillonneur in 1986, and has performed orchestral tunes ever since. The hourlong performances are scheduled for 3 p.m. on Sundays from June 21-Aug. 2, and at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays from July 9-30. In addition, Anderson plays on Saturday, July 4, at 1 p.m., concurring with “Let Freedom Ring,” a nationwide project that began in 1963.
Ascend the neo-gothic tower, situated on Observatory Drive between Ingraham Hall and the Social Science Building, and watch Anderson in action on the baton-shaped keyboard and pedal board that keeps the bells operating. For more information about the upcoming programs, contact Anderson at 219-5291.
“Adam’s off ox” is one of the phrases included in the Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume I: Introduction and A-C , part one of a multivolume effort to capture regional expressions.
The DARE project, as it is known, was initiated in the 1950s by Frederic Cassidy, a well-known linguist who sent field workers out across the country in “word wagons” to interview people. Cassidy’s catalogers talked to nearly 3,000 people over six years, making recordings along the way in order to capture pronunciations.
The artist known as R. Crumb likes New Orleans food more than he likes museums or galleries. He got a lot of the former and a little of the latter on a recent visit to Madison.
In an article in the London Guardian a few years ago, the longtime Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes called Crumb “the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe.”
As a jazz archivist, collector, talent agent and longtime disc jockey, Gary Alderman has rightly earned his chops as Madison’s jazz renaissance man. So when he raves about the Isthmus Jazz Festival’s two-day lineup, fans can trust the solid endorsement.
Granted, Alderman is on the committee that helps select the acts performing at the Memorial Union Terrace for the 21st annual fest.
The best and brightest of the art world can often be found visiting UW-Madison’s Tandem Press.
They come for a special opportunity they can’t find anywhere else.
Those who work there know that operating a printing press can be a challenge both physically and mentally.
The inspiration for writer Kurt McGinnis Brown’s play, “Broken and Entered,” came from an image. What if, after the house lights go down in the theater, all the audience can see are two flashlights?
It’s a compelling start, one that caught the eyes of the judges for Wisconsin Wrights, the annual new play development project at the UW-Madison. Wisconsin Wrights focuses on writers creating plays in Wisconsin, though not necessarily about the state.
Brown’s play is one of three that will receive a staged reading in the Hemsley Theatre this week.
“Broken and Entered” tells the story of two brothers, Vern and Wally, who inherit their mother’s house. Vern decides to wipe the slate clean by removing all of their family possessions and replacing them with other items stolen from neighborhood homes.
It is, he says, “unprecedented for Madison.” Jin-Wen Yu is talking about “What Moves Us,” and the UW-Madison dance professor is not exaggerating. Indeed, he may be flirting with understatement.
Dancers from across town and across the world kicked off Thursday what UW Dance Program Chair Jin-Wen Yu coined “the most exciting dance event in Madison history.”
Erupting from the turbulent social waters of the 1960â??s counter-culture movement, the genre known as underground comics kicked down the doors of the staid funny book status quo with frank depictions of in-your-face drug use, the sweaty excesses of every imaginable sexual orientation and radical political statements unimaginable in the pages of the conventional Comics Code Authority-sanctioned fare found at the corner malt shop newstand. This revolutionary era in American comics is preserved and celebrated with great aplomb in Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix by co-authors James Danky and Denis Kitchen, published this month by Abrams ComicsArts. A companion volume to a fascinating gallery show at the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Chazen Museum of Art, the book documents the first time in American comics when the uncensored ideas of anti-establishment thinkersâ??from women, blacks and homosexuals to other disenfranchised members of American societyâ??were given full and unfettered voice.
Their primary purpose is to serve the scholarly mission of the archive. But Michele Hilmes, director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, allows that three new online exhibits may appeal to an audience far broader than academics and researchers â?? including star-struck movie fans.
The center, a partnership of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, collects materials related to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Three of the center’s collections are featured in the new online exhibits “The Papers of Costume Designer Edith Head,” “Radio Pioneers in Madison” and “Photos and Flat Graphics.” The latter is a collection of nine slide shows focusing on Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, The Ed Sullivan Show, Rita Hayworth, Gary Cooper and other files.
The newest “Star Trek” movie deals with a subject close to my heart: interracial children.
As the mother of interracial children myself, I wondered how this fascination with dual parentage would play out. In the movie, it emerges not in the epic scope of interplanetary warfare, but in the figure of Spock, here situated as a biracial child coping with identity confusion.
Author: Leslie Bow is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine
Quoted: “This book would be useful for art lovers and future historians to un-derstand the rich heritage of the ancient Anga (modern Bhagalpur). It will help them in understanding the importance of the idea of `history at your doorsteps,” said emeritus professor of history, languages and culture of Asia, University of Wisconsin (US), A K Narain. “We have managed to preserve some of these paintings and folklores associated with it at Bhagalpur Museum. Due to the lack of any institu-tional support, several artists associated with the art switched over to other professions,” Sinha said.
When a committee at Washington State University picked The Omnivore’s Dilemma as this year’s “common reading” selection for all incoming freshmen, faculty members effusively praised the award-winning book and hoped that people at the land-grant university were ready to have a serious debate about the practice of agriculture in America.
“Because this book deals with the food we eat today, it is likely to engender lively discussion and even disagreement,” wrote one professor who had recommended it to the committee. “But discussion and disagreement are the bread and butter of academic discourse.”
By Mike Householder, Associated Press
….House, the lead character on the Fox medical drama of the same name, is a Michigan medical school graduate, and the DeGroots are Michigan doctoral candidates who founded the mysterious Dharma Initiative at the center of the ABC serial Lost.
Such tie-ins allow TV and film productions to be more authentic while at the same time providing universities with free advertising and the chance to up their coolness quotient.
“It’s fun for everyone â?? alumni and students â?? to see their university pop up in film,” said Lee Doyle, who heads up the University of Michigan’s film office.
And while that may be, it sometimes can be serious business for Doyle and others who hold the equivalent job at major universities.
They have their school’s reputation to consider in weighing whether to allow it to be associated with a TV show or movie
President Barack Obama has nominated a UW-Madison alumnus to be the next chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, the largest arts organization in the country.
Rocco Landesman, 61, produces Broadway shows like â??Big Riverâ? and â??The Producers.â? His nomination needs to be confirmed by Congress.
A student-produced documentary film, “Like Touching A Hot Stove,” which provides a window into student life for African Americans at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is set to premiere on Tuesday, May 12.
The University of Wisconsin Art Department and School of Educationâ??s Art Lofts facility will celebrate its grand opening beginning today with a series of events to highlight the buildingâ??s purpose and presence on campus.
For painter Matt Martin, the contrast couldn’t be more stark: a dark, tiny basement in Sterling Hall, destined to be demolished, versus his studio now, a bright, airy space, full of ambient light and white walls.
Martin doesn’t work differently in the new Art Lofts building on Frances Street, which has its grand opening this week. He just doesn’t mind the work as much.
“This is brand new, so there’s a little of that brand-newness fear, you know, like – don’t mess it up!” Martin said with a laugh.
The Chazen Museum of Art celebrated its groundbreaking ceremony Friday with Madison community members.
Over 100 students, faculty, and community members gathered at 750 University Avenue to witness the ceremony. When completed, the museum will offer twice the gallery space than that of the current museum, an outdoor plaza, study rooms and a glass-walled lobby that students will be able to peer into when passing by.
Ground was broken Friday afternoon for a $43 million expansion of the Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
The project is happening due to a $25 million donation from UW-Madison alumni Jerome and Simona Chazen.
The Chazen’s are art collectors who live in New York, but they have deep roots in Madison. Three generations of the Chazen family have graduated from UW-Madison.
Madison is certainly no stranger to extraordinarily generous gifts benefiting the arts in our community. We’ve been very lucky. And that good fortune continues Friday as the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW- Madison campus celebrates the beginning of construction on its expansion. The $43 Million expansion is made possible by many generous gifts from private donors, but none more significant than the $25 million from Simona and Jerry Chazen.
The mascot of the University of Wisconsin’s Big Ten football team is (like the state of Wisconsin’s) the badger. There’s a costumed Bucky Badger on the sideline, and thousands of screaming fans identifying themselves as badgers.
But Professor Harold Burroughs of that university takes this badger thing even further. As portrayed by David Ferney in this solo show currently at the Arcata Playhouse, the fictional professor is obsessed by this “noble but misunderstood” animal, and begins to identify with it.
Like two lighter-weight bookends, the UW-Madison Dance Programs began and ended with levity Thursday night, encasing an otherwise serious program.
Not that “Spring Flight,” which showcased the choreography of guest and resident instructors and was mostly danced by students, was a bad experience.
With a 35-lb. head, itâ??s no wonder our dear Bucky Badger acts a little cocky from time to time. The independent film â??Being Buckyâ? gives an in-depth look into the lives of those underneath the sweat-laden Bucky costume.
The last (and first) time “American Idol” finalist Michael Johns was in Wisconsin, he and David Cook sang a show in Green Bay wearing cheesehead hats.
He’ll be back on Tuesday evening — minus Cook — at the Overture Center downtown to judge All-Campus Idol, one of the headlining events this week at UW-Madison’s All-Campus Party. It’s co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the Blair Beinhaker Friendship Foundation.
No one doubts that during the Holocaust, American Jews wanted to help their European brethren. But then why was so little done? Theodore Hamerow, a retired professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, answers this painful question by presenting an extensive study of the days when rescue was still possible.
A dazed-looking young man with long curly strawberry-blond hair wandered alone onstage and sat cross-legged, watching the still-chatting audience at the sold-out, opening night performance of University Theatre’s production of the 1960s rock musical “Hair.” More flower children dressed in fringed leather vests, crocheted tops and peasant skirts filtered through the seats handing out daisies and herbal joints.
With their silken gowns, soft curls and smoky, come-hither eyes, the screen sirens of the 1950s exuded feminine sophistication. Stars like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer seduced a nation with a potent, untouchable sensuality.
It is this feminine power that William Farlow, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University Opera, hopes to harness in his upcoming production of “Alcina,” set in 1950s Hollywood, in a three-show run that begins this weekend in Music Hall.
From the World Music Festival in September to the Isthmus Jazz Festival in June, next year’s season at the Wisconsin Union Theater is guaranteed to get people out of their seats and bodies moving.
The 2009-2010 season, released Wednesday, is an eclectic, worldly lineup, heavy on dance and international acts. Performers include returning favorites like African performer Baaba Maal, an appearance by young jazz chanteuse Jane Monheit, and mandolin player Chris Thile (formerly of Nickel Creek) with the acoustic bluegrass group Punch Brothers.
Hip hop performer/poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph returns to campus to perform a piece he wrote while in residency at the university in 2007 called The Break/s. Bamuthi Joseph and acts like Tiempo Libre, a Cuban-inflected salsa band from Miami, exemplify what the Union Theater is known for: “the hottest new thing,” according to publicist Esty Dinur.
Klezmer, as a musical form, is a bit of a rambler.
Like any music of a people scattered by diaspora, danceable Yiddish rhythms pop up at music festivals everywhere from New York and Chicago to our own International Festival at the Overture Center each spring.
The difference between klezmer, or Jewish secular music, and its Brazilian, African and Celtic stage-mates is that there’s no “old world” where the history still lives. Instead, about 5,000 klezmer recordings made in the U.S. between 1895 and 1942 are essentially the wellspring of the entire genre.
Raking leaves, pulling weeds, trimming, planting, cleaning and more â?? they may even whistle while they work.
The UW-Madison Concert Choir is offering to do your spring yard chores in order to pay off the cost of a European concert tour.
Beverly Taylor is having a particularly busy spring.
Taylor, director of choral activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has three major works scheduled in as many weeks: Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” with the Choral Union (with boys from the Madison Youth Choirs) on April 18-19, the Bach B Minor Mass with the university’s top chorale, Concert Choir, on April 24, and a trio of performances with the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Chorale of Verdi’s Requiem on May 1-3.
It’s an exhausting schedule (and a planning headache), but Taylor is enthusiastic about all of the works. The trouble, she says, is quantity — not quality.
Everybody knows Bucky Badger. Then again, nobody knows Bucky Badger.
That’s why the documentary “Being Bucky” will likely open a few eyes as to what it’s like — and what it takes — to be the live version of the state’s most visible symbol.
The film, which played to a sold-out theater at the Wisconsin Film Festival and will return Friday, April 10, to Point Cinemas, tracks the lives of the seven guys who play Bucky. It begins with the tryouts and continues throughout a busy, busy year.
From the World Music Festival in September to the Isthmus Jazz Festival in June, next year’s season at the Wisconsin Union Theater is guaranteed to get people out of their seats and bodies moving.
The 2009-2010 season, released late Wednesday, is an eclectic, worldly lineup, heavy on dance and international acts.
The e is italic and lower-case. It hovers over the shallow vee of an open book, as if floating up off the middle pages. Smaller than a thumbnail, this icon appears with 19 titles in the spring 2009 University of Wisconsin Press catalog. It represents the availability of a title in digital ebook format. It also signifies the opportunities the UW Press is pursuing amid the contractions and growing complexities confronting the book-publishing industry.
“We’ve been going through this really big transformation of our publishing model,” says Sheila Leary, who assumed directorship of the press last June after 2½ years as interim director. “It used to be that for some books we’d publish simultaneous cloth and paper editions.” After a few years of working with companies like Netlibrary and ebrary to meet research and university libraries’ growing appetite for ebooks, Leary says, future editions will be paper and ebook or cloth and ebook.
So, what’s the deal with the chickens?
Our feathered friends are everywhere in the promotional materials for this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival — on the posters, on the T-shirts, in the TV ads. What’s the underlying rationale for featuring chickens so prominently in the marketing campaign for a film festival?
“I don’t know,” said film festival director Meg Hamel with a mock shrug. “I just like chickens.”
Sometimes, more is definitely better. One of the most popular art exhibitions in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union art galleries is the combined work of dozens of artists.
The UW-Madison Annual Juried Student Art Show, which opens with a reception on Friday, April 3, generally includes between 20 and 40 works of art from students in any major.
Being Bucky Badger just suits some guys better than others.
It takes a lot of time. It takes an ability to wear a big clunky smelly thing on your head. It takes an ability to remain silent.
And it takes an ability to lose one’s self and be one’s self at the very same time.
That’s the world filmmakers John Fromstein and Scott Smith dived into with their documentary “Being Bucky,” which screens at 6:15 p.m. Saturday, April 4 as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.
A new movie is renewing the city’s fascination with the brilliant, beautiful college student who led a second life as a prostitute and killer in the 1970s.
The movie — “Winter of Frozen Dreams” — is debuting Saturday at the Wisconsin Film Festival. It recounts the story of former University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemistry student Barbara Hoffman, who moonlighted at a massage parlor and was accused of fatally poisoning two of her clients for money.
A new film is renewing Madison’s fascination with the smart college student who led a second life as a prostitute and killer in the 1970s.
“Winter of Frozen Dreams” is debuting April 4 at the Wisconsin Film Festival.
It recounts the story of former UW-Madison student Barbara Hoffman. She moonlighted at a massage parlor and was accused of fatally poisoning 2 of her clients.
Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” has always had nice things to say about Madison. In his 2002 book, he ranked Madison No. 1 among small cities with metro populations of 250,000 to 500,000.
Florida has long argued that communities which offer a stimulating working environment for creative people will thrive in the 21st century. This includes towns that embrace the arts, pop music, gay people and ethnic food.
Quoted: UW-Madison professor of real estate Steve Malpezzi, who says it’s way too early to proclaim the housing is crisis over.
When Tino Balio convinced United Artists to donate its early films, photographs and corporate records to the University of Wisconsin Center for Theater Research in the 1960s, it put UW-Madison on the map as a major film research center.
Before long, the center’s name would be changed to reflect that status, becoming the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
But it’s likely that not even Balio — who came to Madison to run the center in 1966 — knew the extent to which the United Artists’ donation would continue to reverberate. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.
Former “Malcolm in the Middle” star Jane Kaczmarek is getting in the middle of the battle over Wisconsin’s film incentives.
She and her “West Wing” actor husband Bradley Whitford, both of whom are Wisconsin natives, sent Gov. Jim Doyle and legislative leaders a letter recently asking them to work on improving the state’s current incentive program rather than scrap it.
“Monk” star Tony Shalhoub, a Green Bay native, also sent Doyle a similar letter on Thursday. Shalhoub spent three weeks in February shooting the independent film “Feed the Fish” in Door County and said that wouldn’t have been done here without the incentives.
(Jane Kaczmarek is an alumna of UW-Madison)
….For a relatively small city, Madison has a wealth of opportunities for adults to learn international dance, from drop-in classes at Dance Fabulous to six-week sessions hosted by Continuing Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The international dance forms have been extremely popular,” said Maureen Janson, a teacher and choreographer who coordinates dance offerings at Continuing Studies. “A lot of our students go because they want an alternative to the gym.
When UW-Madison graduate student James Kryshak walked onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera Feb. 15 to prepare for one of the worldâ??s most prestigious vocal competitions, it felt like a big hug.
“It seems like such a massive space, but when you walk out on stage, it kind of shrinks down,” he said. “You feel like youâ??re being hugged by the space. It was really great to sing out there, to hear your voice bouncing off all the space around you.”
The “Current Tendencies” exhibit, which will open tomorrow at the Haggerty Museum of Art is the first survey of the best contemporary, regional art to be shown in a Milwaukee museum in some time. The show, which will feature 10 artists, marks a change in direction for the Haggerty and its new director Wally Mason.
One of the 10 artists is Jennifer Angus, a Madison-based artist, curator, writer and UW-Madison educator.Here is a video sneak peek at her installation.
My first instinct on hearing that Duke Ellington is now the first African-American to appear alone on a coin was to call Marsh Smith and sit him down at a table at Babe’s on Schroeder Road and get him to tell me the story of the Duke’s appearance at the Memorial Union in the 1950s, when Marsh was handling the Union’s public relations.
