Category: Arts & Humanities

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.

Thirty-six black and white photographs taken by Madisonâ??s own Michael Kienitz come together at the Chazen Museum of Art to form a wonderful photo essay called â??Small Arms: Children of Conflict.â? The photographs were taken during Kienitzâ??s world travels from 1978 to 1988, and are powerful in their subject matter and style. Kienitz uses wide-angle shots to give the viewer more than just a portrait of a person, but a portrait of that personâ??s relationship with their surroundings.

William Rehnquist “was a brutal editor, stripping his clerks’ words down to the essentials, taking out what he called, with some contempt, â??the reasoning,'” Jeffrey Toobin writes in “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” (Doubleday, 384 pages, $27.95).

As one walks through the dimly lit rooms housing the â??Natura Mortaâ? Medici â??still lifeâ? collections at the Chazen Museum of Art, it becomes easy to see how the Italian term for still life developed from the word for â??death.â? The botanical subjects of the paintings emerge vividly from an eerie and intense darkness as if they decorated the gates of the Underworldâ??the meticulousness of their creation at once fantastic and frighteningly realistic.

IT WAS during a lunch at the Harvard Club in 1988 that Alvin Lane first invited Russell Panczenko, director of the art museum at UW-Madison, to visit Lane’s house in New York City and see his art collection. Panczenko would recall that Lane described the collection as “modest.” When Panczenko actually saw it, some months later, he used another word. “It was awesome,” he said.

The two were lunching in the first place because Lane, who died in Manhattan last week at 89, had thought enough of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its art museum to have made several cash donations to the museum over the years.

STEVE LEVITAN says he knows what it’s like to be pregnant.

“At this point I just want it out of me,” Levitan was saying Tuesday. He was laughing, stuck in traffic in Los Angeles, when he said it.

Levitan’s baby, a sitcom named “Back to You,” enters the world at 7 tonight on the Fox Network. It stars Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton and is one of the most highly anticipated new shows of the television season. With his partner Christopher Lloyd, Levitan created “Back to You,” and the two share executive producer and writer credits on the show.

Alvin S. Lane, a former partner in a major New York City real estate law firm and a leader of efforts to protect art collectors from fraud, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 89 and had homes in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and on Marthaâ??s Vineyard.

The art collection of Mr. Lane and his wife, the former Terese Lyons, which includes works by Picasso, Giacometti, Calder and Nevelson, is to be donated to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Mr. Lane graduated in 1940.

During the Vietnam War in the 1970s, demonstrations could be seen just outside classroom windows at the University of Wisconsin. Photographer Michael Kienitz was one of many students drawn to the power and devastating effects of war during this time. As a political philosophy major, Kienitz graduated to move on to photojournalism, capturing conflict on assignment for The Capital Times and U.S. News & World Report, among others.

Feature story on “Small Arms: Children of Conflict,” an exhibit of Michael Kienitz’ photographs, which is on display at Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art until Oct. 28.

Andrew Bird is on his biodiesel-powered bus in Asheville, N.C., a phone in his hand, waking up to another interview, another day on tour. It ‘s Sept. 11 — a date that could have everything, or nothing, to do with the metaphysical questions posed by his latest album, the multi-layered “Armchair Apocrypha. “

The University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art has decided to celebrate an impressive and luxurious art show with an impressive and luxurious closing reception.

To celebrate the exhibition “Natura Morta: Still-Life Painting and the Medici Collections,” the Chazen will host a special benefit event called “A Medici Masquerade” on Friday, Oct. 19, from 6 to 8 p.m. It will feature festive music, dancing, entertainment, hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar.

….Those who attend can expect to experience an evening at the Medici court, according to the invitation. They will “mingle and carouse” with fellow art lovers, “dance with the ladies and gents from Courtly Cadenza.”

The Madison World Music Festival will take over the Memorial Union Theater and Terrace this weekend, giving audiences a cosmopolitan menu of music and dance from all corners of the world. As always, the three-day festival is entirely free and open to the public.

This year, on the heels of the screening of the musical documentary “Gypsy Caravan” at Sundance, the festival will feature three different Romani or Gypsy bands.

This fall’s UW-Cinematheque series takes its audience from France to Japan to India to the farthest regions of outer space — or at least outer space as imagined by Russian filmmakers.

The free on-campus film series has always been a place for cinephiles to see classic and foreign films so obscure or adventuresome that they make the films at Madison’s thriving arthouse theaters look like “Underdog” by comparison.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art is a fine, small art museum that’s grown up. Since an increasing number of local and state donors began building on the generous legacy of the Peck family of Milwaukee philanthropists, it has outgrown its strictly local identity as the West Bend Museum of Art.

They are not your typical smiling children.

The children are smiling, all right, but they are standing on a tank gun, sitting in a bombed-out bus or holding an automatic assault rifle.

This is Kevin Henkes as a child, as he described himself in a recent speech:

“I love books. I love to read them, and I love to look at them. Examine them. Smell them. Run my fingers over the paper. I’m huddled in the corner behind the big red chair (in his living room), with a stack of new library books. I feel complete. Happy. I feel as if nothing can disturb me. I’m enveloped. It’s just me and my books behind the big red chair.”

A profile of the nationaly known children’s book author and illustrator, and a former UW-Madison student.

These days, still-lifes often seem banal and are frequently treated as little more than decorative art, the kind of thing that the right room and right furniture needs: some fruit, some flowers. But that wasn’t always the case.

Time was, religious scenes and portraits of aristocrats were much more important and popular.
But like so much that we owe in art, the still-lifes you see at today’s art fairs, museums and galleries owe a lot to the Italian Renaissance and to the figures who dominated politics and business but also supported the arts. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Starting Friday night, you can see for yourself at the University of Wisconsin ‘s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., where a major new imported touring show, “Natura Morta: Still-Life Paintings and the Medici Collections, ” will be on view to the public until Oct. 21.

At most times the Raven Nature Trail is a pleasant and not overly strenuous 1.5-mile interpretive trail through the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest, a few miles from the busy resort communities of Minocqua and Woodruff. But this summer, and continuing into the fall, the trail has been converted to a sort of outdoor gallery for international artists as part of Forest Art Wisconsin, a collaboration of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry.

Four very different art shows are now on view at the UW Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St., and each has its attraction and should draw viewers as Labor Day approaches, school begins again and the Union buzzes with activity.

The Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission has announced the award of 43 grants totaling $163,600 for community arts and cultural programs.

(The UW-Madison Art Department, Wisconsin Union Theater & Chazen Museum of Art are among the grant recipients.)

He began teaching at the Madeline Island Music Camp at its founding in 1986 and became its artistic director in 2000, bringing the luminaries of chamber and ensemble groups to Madeline Island from across the nation.

“Vartan had a passion, love and intensity for the music and teaching,” said the camp’s founder and executive director, Tom George. “He had a willingness to give and give and give to his students.”

A review of Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century

Mention the name Henry Kissinger and the responses, depending on the audience, will range from admiration to anger. As national security adviser to President Richard Nixon and secretary of state under Nixon and President Gerald Ford, Kissinger was intimately involved in setting — even revolutionizing, in some instances — American foreign policy. He was and remains a politically polarizing figure. Whatever one’s reaction, however, few would question his importance in decisively reshaping America’s relationship to much of the world.

Jeremi Suri, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, assesses Kissinger’s political life in his ambitious new study, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century.” Although attentive to Kissinger’s personal life, particularly his early years, the book is “not a traditional biography” or “standard history,” Suri insists. Rather, it is a “narrative of global change, a study of how social and political transformations across multiple societies created our contemporary world,” changes to which Kissinger “was directly connected.” The result is an often-engaging but uneven study that says more about the shaping of Kissinger’s worldview than it does about Kissinger’s reshaping the world.

The two ends of State Street are hosting touring shows of works on paper that demonstrate some apparent differences, but also some strong affinities, especially in the way they use collage to combine many, many disparate images into one work.

….At the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, you’ll find the paper works of Jane Hammond, a world-renowned New York artist who did her graduate work at UW-Madison in the 1970s.

In his early 20s, UW-Madison grad Michael Stanek got a performance job in Florida with Disney. He liked it so much, the Spring Green native figured he’d become a “lifer” — a long-time Disney performer who’d stick with the company for decades, working his way up to the title of, say, choreographer, or maybe heading into management.

Perhaps because of the pungently Nixonian odor of the Bush White House — the patriotism politics, the “l’état, c’est moi” declarations, the war — this season has delivered a bounty of books about the men of Watergate. The current climate has vitalized anxieties about the imperial presidency, drawing fresh scrutiny to the Nixon years from such eminent writers as Robert Dallek, Elizabeth Drew, Margaret MacMillan, James Reston Jr., and Jules Witcover — not to mention a Nixon biography from the scandal-plagued tycoon Conrad Black and the Broadway drama “Nixon/Frost.”

Joining this lengthening queue is Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, with a useful, idiosyncratic study, Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

All the prognosticators and futurists agree: Classical music is in deep trouble and probably belongs on the endangered species list. It may even be quietly but inexorably threatened with eventual extinction. By silence.

Next season, for the first time, the Madison Opera will charge more than $100 for a seat. Opera-goers can’t get enough of them.

….In fact, the opera company’s success is mirrored widely among most of Madison’s prominent arts groups. With about a month to go before single tickets go on sale, most of the groups are reporting brisk subscription sales that rival or surpass last year’s by substantial percentages.

According to the various arts groups, such increases provide more proof that Madison is continuing to buck the national trend of subscription sales flattening or, in fact, declining.

It is nothing new for Christopher Taylor, the celebrated pianist and UW-Madison music professor, to play a concert in New York.

Kit Taylor, as he is known to friends, has admirers all over the world. But Taylor’s Sunday performance at the Caramoor International Music Festival, outside New York City in Westchester County, was special because of the instrument Taylor used to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.

On a hot Thursday night recently on the UW Memorial Union Terrace, as moths swoop in the stage lights and fans jockey for the prime spots in front of the stage, the members of the band Cloud Cult get ready to perform.

Cellist Sarah Young is seated at the front of the stage tuning her instrument, while drummer Dan Greenwood is doing a few experimental fills on his drum set. And, at the back of the stage, Scott West and Connie Minowa are making their own preparations. They’re mixing paint.

KATONAH, N.Y., July 15 â?? For musical instruments, and a lot of other industrial tools, the 18th century was an age of inventions. Restless tinkerers looked for new shapes and functions, building and designing in a spirit that we today have more or less turned over to electronic composers. Mozartâ??s famous clarinet pieces, for example, cannot be played exactly as written, because for him the instrument was less a single, identifiable device than a series of experiments in size and range.

The instrument could stump contestants on â??Jeopardy!â?: It has 164 keys and four pedals. Oh, and two keyboards.

The correct response is neither â??What is an organ?â? nor â??What is a harpsichord?â? No, the answer involves an almost one-of-a-kind piano from the late 1920â??s, which Christopher Taylor will play this afternoon at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y. It is the only two-keyboard instrument Steinway ever made, and Mr. Taylor considers it the perfect piano for the piece he will perform there, Bachâ??s â??Goldbergâ? Variations.