Category: Arts & Humanities

Tom Haig came to work at UW-Madison after a career in research and development in the U.S. Air Force, and spent 32 years on his 80 acres near Black Earth converting a dairy barn to a home. He and Bobbie raised five children, 23 foster children, and seven “borrowed ” children, the kids of friends and relatives who ‘d move in on the farm and just stick around.

Art-wise, things are generally quiet here during the “winter intermission,” though the beginning of the month will always see some new shows going up. More important, this is your last weekend to catch three major shows that come down after Sunday.

At the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, you can see a big, bright and beautiful exhibition drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of Japanese woodblock prints. It’s called “Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School.” It’s one of the must-see shows of 2007.

….If you’re looking for new art to see, early January is also a great chance to remind you that the Wisconsin Union Galleries, at the Memorial Union at 800 Langdon St., have opened again after the UW winter break.

….it is worth noting how much outstanding fine art is already located in this city of less than 250,000 that sits in a county of only about 460,000 — hardly a major metropolitan center or money axis to compete with New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and even Milwaukee, all of which have much bigger populations and more wealthy patrons.

And the local collections are about to get even better. By a lot.

Although details are still being worked out, the Chazen is about to benefit mightily from a rich bequest by a New York businessman whose personal art collection included works by such titans as Giacometti, Picasso and Matisse among many others. Small wonder the Chazen desperately needs the new building that is scheduled to open by 2011.

(In addition the Chazen, the UW’s Gallery of Design and the Memorial Union Galleries also mentioned in this article.)

If you’re looking for a break from the cold, snow and ice we’ve had this December, you might stop into the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., and climb up to the second floor to the niche case, between Brittingham Galleries III and IV, which is used to display new acquisitions.

There you will find a very large (approximately 3 feet by 4 feet) inkjet color photograph, “Cuba,” that will you transport to a different, warmer climate.

….Unfortunately, the photo will only be on show through Dec. 28. Then another recent acquisition will take its place.

Andrew Imbrie, a prominent San Francisco Bay Area composer and noted University of California-Berkeley music professor who was perhaps best known for his 1976 opera “Angle of Repose,” has died. He was 86.

….Imbrie also had close ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught and coached the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble….He dedicated his String Quartet No. 4 (1969) to the Pro Arte String Quartet, which has performed all five of Imbrie’s string quartets and which recorded the String Quartets Nos. 4 and 5 and the Impromptu for Violin and Piano with retired UW piano professor Howard Karp.

Imbrie also taught current UW composer Laura Schwendinger, and UW Pro Arte violist Sally Chisholm participated in the world premiere of Imbrie’s Piano Quartet.

Between cranky relatives and overcooked ham, the holiday season provides plenty of fodder for writers. In that spirit, here are a few writing-oriented events to get literary types through the holiday season:

In 2001, UW-Madison graduate Barry Poltermann was living in Los Angeles and trying to find “something fun to do for our work Christmas party” at his company, Civilian Pictures.

LAST WEEK was pretty special for Joe McBride, a Wisconsin native who studied film at UW-Madison in the late 1960s and in 1970 went west to interview the great director John Ford.

McBride spent an hour with Ford, or, I should say, spent an hour in Ford’s company. As a film scholar, McBride has actually spent decades with the famed director of such classics as “The Searchers” and “Fort Apache,” and the association may have peaked last week.

Most scientists specializing in hurricane studies work primarily to increase their physical understanding of the dynamics and thermodynamics of hurricanes and to improve the ability of meteorologists to forecast a storm’s track and intensity. Until recently, only a few of them were involved in research related to climate change, but over the past few years, the topic has received a great deal more attention. Interest in it has been piqued by an increase in North Atlantic hurricane activity.

James P. Kossin is a research scientist specializing in hurricane studies and tropical meteorology at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

By early 1985, one year before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the United States, the Soviet Union and a few other states had together amassed 50,000 nuclear bombs and warheads. These devices threatened destruction 1.5 million times greater than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 40 years earlier. Future generations of historians will struggle to explain why the leading Cold War states devoted so much treasure to so many of these horrible weapons.

Requiems are not your usual fare when its comes to holiday music.
One usually turns to brighter, more uplifting music.

….And yet last weekend’s performances at the UW-Madison of Karol Szymanowski’s darkly moody “Stabat Mater” and especially Mozart’s poignant Requiem felt right for the season. They helped set up a heart-felt and very non-materialist, alternative mood for the holidays. One left those works, and those performances of them, awed by beauty and pensive about life.

When people think of Britain in the 1800s, they often think of the technological and scientific advancements of the emerging empire. What they do not think of immediately are the improvements in art techniques that dramatically changed British society and its depiction on canvas.

Among the numerous artistically enriching opportunities available throughout Madison, the Chazen Museum of Artâ??s impressive exhibition of 120 works from its renowned Van Vleck collection of Japanese woodblock prints is both aesthetic and educational.

The genius of forever-young insouciance staring into his own grave? That’s the monumental paradox emanating from Mozart’s “Requiem.” He died before he could finish the work, which he had promised for another dying man.

The UW Choral Union and Chamber Orchestra and director Beverly Taylor will resurrect this dark transcendence at 8 tonight and Saturday in Mills Hall, 455 Park St. Karol Szymanowski’s “Stabat Mater” also is on the program.

Some artists talk a lot about working with young people and students. Other artists just do it.

Among the latter is four-time Grammy-winner soprano Dawn Upshaw – who will perform Joseph Cantaloube’s popular “Songs of the Auvergne” and contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Three Songs with Orchestra” with the Madison Symphony Orchestra in Overture Hall this Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

Upshaw will lead an on-campus master class at the Carol Rennebohm Auditorium, Music Hall, UW-Madison on Thursday, Nov. 15, beginning at 2:30 p.m. and running to about 4 p.m

Many things distinguish Madison, but one of the least known ones is the impressive collection of some 4,000 Japanese woodblock prints in the Van Vleck Collection of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art.

You can see a major and large new exhibition of these prints in two galleries. About 130 prints are in the show “Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School” and about 210 are featured in the impressively illustrated catalog. Both offer some eye-catching art.

“Looks like Madison was ready to have an environmental film festival,” declares Gregg Mitman to an overflowing crowd at the Orpheum Theatre on Friday night. The entire lower level of the auditorium is filled for the kickoff of Tales from Planet Earth, a free showcase of nearly two dozen movies that tell stories about the environment and how humanity interacts with and depicts our shared world. In fact, hundreds of people stand outside in a line running down State Street, waiting for a chance to get in for a talk by writer Bill McKibben and a screening of Everything’s Cool, a documentary about the political battle over global warming.

For almost 50 years, he was arguably the most famous artist working in Madison.

His work had been featured in Life magazine, and from 1948 until 1972, he was the University of Wisconsin artist-in-residence who succeeded the legendary regionalist John Steuart Curry.

After he died in 1992, painter Aaron Bohrod fell into relative obscurity.

Letters, family photos and other personal documents donated to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research by Kirk Douglas, a prominent Hollywood actor, can now be viewed on a recently launched website.

I have said and written many times that dollar for dollar, no place in town gives you more great music in more great performances than the University of Wisconsin School of Music’s Faculty Concert Series.

….The UW Transportation Services – what a euphemism – seems to be doing its best to screw things up and make me revise my view.

No one’s calling it a crisis yet, but Madison’s major arts organizations have been caught off guard by slower than expected season openings.

Possible reasons for the lower attendance range from competing sports and music events to bad programming to unknown performers. The overall economy also may be playing a role.

But most of the arts presenters simply said they are perplexed.

When inspired choreography, dancing and music come together, they grab hold of an audience and don’t let go.

All three elements meshed on Thursday night as a packed house at UW-Madison’s Lathrop Hall basked in 90 minutes of “Concert 10” by Jin-Wen Yu Dance. The evening could have gone on longer, and the viewer’s mind was so entranced it rarely wandered beyond the stage.

Another square-shouldered architectural mass will rise on the UW-Madison campus, a quietly imposing presence to protect the vast riches of the Chazen Museum of Art.

Rodolfo Machado’s design for the museum’s expansion, unveiled Thursday, is also meant to present and illuminate. Yet the facade’s stern simplicity hides an elegant array of subtle solutions to the challenge of doubling the size of the original fortress-like design by Chicago architect Harry Weiss.

Another square-shouldered architectural mass will rise on the UW-Madison campus, a quietly imposing presence to protect the vast riches of the Chazen Museum of Art.

Chazen Museum of Art officials unveiled the design concept of an adjacent addition to the facility Thursday, a $36 million project set to begin construction by early 2009.

Nearly two and a half years after a $20 million gift from UW-Madison alums Simona and Jerome Chazen inspired its name change, the Chazen Museum of Art will unveil renderings tonight for a 70,000-square-foot expansion on University Avenue â?? even as officials pursue an additional $9 million needed to make the plan a campus reality.

….Chuck Tranberg, who works in the business office at Meriter, had for some time been a biography writer in search of a subject when he wandered into the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research (a cooperative effort of the Wisconsin Historical Society and UW-Madison) several years ago.

Verona – Most of the time, Nicholas Hitchon goes about his life undisturbed: driving to his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, meeting with his engineering students, pursuing his research, taking karate classes to work out the kinks.

But every seven years, like certain insects or Biblical events, a film crew arrives. They are cheerful, professional and relentless. In addition to following him everywhere for a week – up UW-Madison’s picturesque Bascom Hill, down to his karate class – they repeatedly “ram a microphone in my face,” as Hitchon grimly puts it, and ask him about his family life, his progress at work, his dreams and his disappointments.

The University of Wisconsin’s Pro Arte String Quartet is taking a break this semester. Well, a part-time break — from teaching, but not from performing.

“It’s like a half-sabbatical,” says cellist Parry Karp, the senior member of the group that will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012 with several commissions. That’s because three of the four members (second violinist Suzanne Beia is the exception) hold joint appointments that are half-time performing and half-time teaching.

Former Madisonian Eric Salisbury, who has 11 years of experience as a performing arts manager, has been hired as 201 State Foundation’s first-ever vice president of development. (That’s business lingo for a full-time fundraiser.)

The 201 State Foundation is the non-profit entity for Overture Center for the Arts.

Overture President Tom Carto praised Salisbury’s vision and leadership, and his connections to Madison.

There it lay, outside the back, or north, entrance to the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Art Museum, behind the red brick Faculty Club and not too far from the soon-to-be-demolished Humanities Building.

The square Tootsie Roll of handsome purplish granite that read “Chazen Museum of Art” had been snapped. Broken in two.

Was it the victim of drunken accident? Of vandalism? Of rebellious students wanting to overturn something? Not at all. Turns out a University of Wisconsin police car drove into it one Sunday a couple of weeks ago, apparently because the driver simply didn’t see the low placed bench.