“Does art imitate nature, as Aristotle said? Or does nature imitate art, as Oscar Wilde said?
The answer, at least according to a new show of Japanese, British and American color woodcuts that opens this weekend at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, is that art imitates other art.
In this day and age, when your Web site crashes due to heavy traffic, you know you’re doing something right.
Such was the case with University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Danny Tenenbaum, who is planning the first Madison Pop Festival on Friday and Saturday at the Memorial Union.
Fourteen acts will play across three stages, and best of all, the entire event is free to the public and open to all ages. (Organizers suggest donating $20 to a favorite charity.)
….Those who want to see “The Madison Kid” filmed in Madison have mobilized one last push to see if they can get state government to change the date of implementation of the tax incentives to Jan. 1, 2007. As part of that effort, Hellmuth has written an op-ed piece that will be offered to numerous papers in the state.
In his piece, Hellmuth makes both a logical and passionate case for moving the date so “The Madison Kid” can be filmed here. He stresses the economic benefits, as well as the karmic importance of having it shot in Madison.
It may work. But I have an idea that will work even better. It’s this: Promise them all a role in the movie! Everyone wants to be in the movies, especially legislators….
If you think retailers are fighting it out for buyers this holiday season, consider the box-office battle for live theater audiences in the Madison area.
Over at the University Of Wisconsin School of Music, and at Edgewood College too, the fall semester is busily finishing up and winding down to the holidays just exactly as you would expect: with lots of singing and brass playing.
Combining books and CDs with tickets to a live performance makes a great holiday gift based on companionship.
Holidays are a good time to establish new ties and reaffirm old ties, to feel less isolated from others, from the culture around us, and from ourselves and our own interests.
Those who want to develop a film industry in Wisconsin are back for the sequel and are working to bump up the effective date of a package of tax incentives intended to lure movie, television and commercial projects here.
Sen. Ted Kanavas (R-Brookfield) said he’s preparing two bills that aim to put the tax credits in effect earlier than the current start date of Jan. 1, 2008.
WHOEVER SAID there is no business but show business was onto something.
Stanley Kutler, the esteemed U.S. historian who lives in Madison, was sipping tea on the far west side Monday afternoon and thinking about something his late, great colleague in the UW history department, George Mosse, used to say about being a professor.
“We don’t teach,” Mosse said. “We perform.”
Taking the next step in the UW-Madison Campus Master Plan, the Chazen Museum of Art held its campaign kick-off Friday evening for its forthcoming expansion.
The Chazen, 800 University Ave., will take over the space currently occupied by the Alfred Walter Peterson Building, 750 University Ave.
This is in response to Jacob Stockinger’s Oct. 12 column in Rhythm. In it, he described the Madison Symphony Orchestra concert that featured bassist Edgar Meyer. He shared his thoughts and predictions about the pieces that were to be performed and his expectations for the audience.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the 2006 Wisconsin CowParade!
The corporate sponsors gave so many talented artists the opportunity to create wonderful creatures that the entire community has enjoyed over the past few months. The attendees and bidders at Friday’s auction provided tremendous support for the American Family Children’s Hospital and other area nonprofits groups.
“Oh my gosh, yes, Monroe Street has changed,” Hank Reese acknowledges. “But is it really such a bad thing?”
It is 10:55 on a recent midweek morning, and the 81-year-old Reese, dapper as ever in a powder blue shirt and beige cardigan sweater, is standing in the same spot where he has spent much of the last 59 years – behind the cashier counter at Mickies Dairy Bar, the most popular diner this city has ever known.
He is also giving me his own no-holds-barred perspective on the vast transformation that continues to take place in the neighborhood southwest of Camp Randall Stadium.
They are small and colorful, detailed and exotic.
What’s more, these lacquered boxes made of papier-mache tell stories and fairy tales, if you know how to read them and have a background in Russian folklore and literature.
“Russian Lacquer Boxes: A Narrative Tradition from the Frederick Seibold Collection” will go on view Friday at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. The exhibit will run in the Mayer Gallery through Jan. 14.
Arsenio Cicero came to Madison from Havana seven years ago, and his life has not been the same.
“I had two lives, one before in Cuba and one studying here,” he said.
You could think of filmmaker Saul Landau as the University of Wisconsin’s answer to Noam Chomsky, the controversial East Coast public intellectual and social activist who was recently praised, to the outrage of both Republicans and Democrats, at the United Nations by the populist and left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The 70-year-old Landau, who has just donated his life’s work to the UW, will be honored this week at the University of Wisconsin’s seventh annual Cinefest, a free film celebration of Latino culture, which will run from Thursday through Sunday.
It isn�t everyday a University of Wisconsin student organization celebrates its 10th anniversary at a popular downtown venue in front of more than 1,000 devoted fans.
CowParade Wisconsin raised more than $363,500 for a new University of Wisconsin hospital at an auction Friday, turning profits from the temporary, colorful cow display into a permanent part of campus.
The real center of Ghost Hunters is not, as its subtitle suggests, William James, the American pioneer in psychology and researcher in the paranormal, but Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife and mother and paranormal phenomenon. Her astounding capacities as a medium captured the attention, and often the approbation, of not only James but a crowd of 19th-century scientists.
When Elizabeth Zimmermann came to the U.S. from England in 1937 with her German-born, brewmaster husband, she passed the time on the ship from Southhampton to New York by knitting en route.
It was just the beginning of a revolutionary journey.
Wisconsin’s CowParade auction raised $363,500 from the 44 cows sold in a four-hour silent and live auction at the Alliant Center on Friday.
MADISON, Wis. — Election news has proliferated just about every public arena in recent months and now it has made its way to a local stage.A group of students moved election coverage into a format that is both new and old in a project called “A Living Newspaper,” WISC-TV reported.It was something created during the Great Depression by the Federal Theater Project to bring awareness to controversal issues by having actors write and present monologues and vignettes from news coverage. Now, a group of Universiyt of Wisconsin theater students are hoping to use their acting craft in the same way — to inform.
Habib Koite returned to Madison on Sunday and this time the musician from Mali brought along a few friends.
Together they rocked a capacity crowd at the Wisconsin Union Theater like it’s never been rocked before.
Dear Editor: In the old Biochemistry Building is a group of famous murals by the American artist John Steuart Curry, painted from 1941-43….The University Planning Office and the state architects are planning renovation of the historic structure, not demolition, so the murals don’t have to be moved.
….I have proposed integrating students into the conservation of the murals. I let my students help in making murals, why not today in their preservation? Sounds like a good idea, except the state wants to give the contract to an out-of-state firm.
Maurice Ravel is easily the most imaginative and idiosyncratic of the French Impressionists, at least when it comes to opera. Those who doubt that may want to attend University Opera’s production of “L’enfant et les sortileges,” which opened Friday before about 250 people in Mills Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus.
Did you hear the one about the law professor who wrote a book about lawyer jokes that wasn’t so funny?
Sorry. There is no punch line. It’s a true story. Marc Galanter, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, has given us “Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes & Legal Culture,” a book that uses a vast and impressive collection of past and present lawyer jokes to help identify and explain both the causes and results of our national love-hate (these days mostly “hate”) relationship with the legal profession.
This will be a busy week for classical music, and a good week for reminding the listening public just how much of the classical music scene in Madison, when it comes to presenters, performers and even composers, is owed directly or indirectly to the University of Wisconsin School of Music.
Swirls of color, writhing bodies and confetti cannons welcome us to Carnivale at the beginning of “The Rover,” the latest offering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University Theatre.
In some ways it’s a long 150-minute ride, but also one full of energy, humor and enough technical eye candy to keep us entertained throughout the trip.
Karlos Moser — the acclaimed former director of the University Opera for nearly 40 years — returns to campus and Music Hall with a premiere concert of song cycles Sunday.
An online auction that begins Nov. 11 will likely raise less money, with bidding on the 39 cows starting at $1,000 apiece.
Sixty percent of the proceeds will go toward construction of the $78 million UW Children’s Hospital. The remaining 40 percent will go to a charity designated by each cow’s sponsor.
At 76, retired University of Wisconsin-Madison music professor Karlos Moser remembers the first time he heard and saw grand opera produced grandly. He was studying at Princeton University in New Jersey and would slip into New York City to see productions at the famed Metropolitan Opera. That’s where he saw the world’s greatest singers in the world’s greatest operas.
….Moser, who composes as well as produces, directs and conducts opera, will hold a special concert this Sunday to raise money for an endowment fund to buy season tickets to professional opera companies in Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago. UW students, including musicians and production people, would get to use those tickets.
The same legs that took the UW professor of African languages and literature up and down the southeast coast of Africa four times in the 1960s and 1970s now walk him from his home on the Capitol Square to Van Hise Hall every morning.
Here is a schedule of events for “Paris in Performance,” an interdisciplinary exploration of music, dance, poetry, lectures, film and art re-creating French political and artistic visions from 1870 to 1920.
All events except the UW opera performance are free and do not require tickets. Visit the UW School of Music Web site� for details.
University of Wisconsin pianist Catherine Kautsky has visited Paris many times since she first went there at 13. But there is one time she remembers most fondly and vividly.
She had a sabbatical in 1994-95, and she and her philosophy professor husband, and their two children, had decided to go to Paris because they thought that’s where they would live the good life.
….Now, with the support of the UW Arts Institute, she has a new project to bring the wonders of French music and culture, especially art about childhood and absurdist art, to a broad Madison public.
So what exactly happened in Michigan that has Chancellor John Wiley primed to dismember entire sections of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band?
No one in the band seems to know, and the administrators who do aren�t saying much.
ââ?¬Å?I think no one in the entire band knows what happened in Michigan,ââ?¬Â UW sophomore and band member Kevin Hart said after practice yesterday. ââ?¬Å?There werenââ?¬â?¢t any arrests; there wasnââ?¬â?¢t any serious injury. I have no idea what spurred it at all.ââ?¬Â
When John Lemke puts on a costume to become a headless ventriloquist this month, he’s not just celebrating Halloween. The Wisconsin Historical Museum’s publicist is competing for your attention, and your time.
….Eight Madison tourist sites this month are beginning a collaboration, dubbed M8, to increase their visibility by presenting themselves as one. Lemke heads the charge; other participants are the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison Children’s Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Chazen Museum of Art, UW Geology Museum, Monona Terrace and Olbrich Botanical Gardens.
The reviewer, Rob Nixon, is the Rachel Carson professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
This Saturday, which happens to be UW Arts Night Out, a campus-wide celebration of the visual and performing arts, features one of the concerts on my “must hear” list for this season.
Saturday night at 8 in Mills Hall, the UW’s Pro Arte String Quartet will perform a surefire program of great masterworks, all meant to celebrate anniversaries.
Cancer is a devastating diagnosis to receive.
But it can also become a community rallying point for empowerment and entertainment, as advocates for breast cancer awareness and support have proven in recent years with a variety of community, athletic and artistic events.
This Friday night, men will take their cue from women and turn to the topic of prostate cancer.
When director Norma Saldivar first gathered the children’s cast of the play “Esperanza Rising,” she brought family pictures. There were pictures of her parents, who emigrated from Mexico to Chicago Heights in the 1950s, where her dad worked in the steel mills.
She’s now an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama and heads the graduate directing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
By Jacob Stockinger
There’s a lot more classical music being performed this week, including an all-Mozart program and two free guest artist concerts at the University of Wisconsin School of Music…
Meg Hamel, who took the reins of the Wisconsin Film Festival as interim director last year, has now been hired as its permanent director.
The UW Arts Institute, which runs the four-day festival, hired Hamel for the position after a nationwide candidate search. She just spent the last week at the Toronto International Film Festival scouting potential films for next year’s event.
The Madison World Music Festival is expanding in a volatile world.
Performers who are also global travelers seem to sense the danger in international politics, and that cultural unrest is affecting Madison’s free festival, which runs Thursday through Sunday at the Wisconsin Memorial Union, for better and worse.
Some international musicians want to perform in America because of its controversial role in international affairs. Others choose not to, for similar reasons.
It takes a village to put on a global performance gala, which is why 11 people make up the committee that planned the Madison World Music Festival.
On Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, thousands of music lovers will flood the Memorial Union Terrace for free performances thanks to their hard work. Dancing along with the crowd will be Esty Dinur, one of the founding organizers of the third-annual festival at UW.
Local artists and scientists are working together to create an art exhibit to help the public understand global warming.
The exhibit, titled “Paradise Lost? Artists on Climate Change in the Northwoods,” will bring the work of scientists and artists together to tour Wisconsin and Michigan during the next two years, with a stop in Madison in early 2008.
John Magnuson, professor emeritus of limnology at UW-Madison, said the unlikely match between the two fields was complementary.
Madison movie, kind of:
We can claim some ownership of “The Last Kiss,” since the new Zach Braff comedy-drama was shot partially in Madison. (If you don’t blink, you can see a shot of the Capitol in the trailer.) But aside from looking for your house in the background, the movie looks like it’s worth seeing for a smart and insightful look at relationships, and is getting some strong early reviews.
(Lakeshore Entertainment’s Tom Rosenberg and Andre Lamal, both UW-Madison alumni, filmed scenes for their movie on campus as well as downtown in June 2005.)
When the gavel goes down at major art auction houses, does the value of works by the same artist in local collections go up?In most cases, say local museum directors, the answer is yes, with some important qualifications.
(Chazen Museum of Art director Russell Panczenko is among those quoted.)
This weekend marks the centennial of the birth of pianist Gunnar Johansen, who served from 1939 to 1976 as the first artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where he gave private lessons, taught group classes and performed solo, chamber and orchestral music.
Events will take place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and all events will be free and open to the public.
….there are Godard fans like University of Wisconsin Cinematheque programmer Tom Yoshikami, who was inspired not only to study film by Godard, but to learn French so he didn’t have to rely on the English subtitles. That makes him the perfect person to program an extensive retrospective of Godard’s work for the Cinematheque fall film series.
Ben Schumaker’s “Memory Project” already connects the lives of thousands of American high schoolers with children living in orphanages in some of the world’s poorest countries.
Tonight, it could grab the attention of millions of television viewers worldwide.
Now in its third year, the program founded by the UW- Madison grad in his former one-room sublet recruits artists at high schools across the country to create masterful portraits of the children, many of whom own nothing more than the clothes on their backs – and possess no other visual records of their childhoods.
The real center of Ghost Hunters is not, as its subtitle suggests, William James, the American pioneer in psychology and researcher in the paranormal, but Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife and mother and paranormal phenomenon.
This week, the summer classical music season winds down and the fall classical season begins.
The former will take place at the 17th annual Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, and the latter will be at the University of Wisconsin School of Music’s Mills Hall on Monday at 7:30 p.m., when the Faculty Concert Series kicks off with the always popular annual Karp Family Labor Day Concert.
One of Madison’s longtime residents is also one of its least-well-known artists.
But that may be about to change with a show called “Wild Edges,” which opens Saturday and runs through Nov. 5 at the University of Wisconsin Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.
In case you had forgotten, last week’s torrential rains were a reminder that, being in the Upper Midwest, we do not have an endless summer here in Madison. Things get gray, things get cold, and people head indoors.
Let’s all get an early jump on Thanksgiving, then, and be thankful that fall’s also the time when the concert scene revs up again to greet us. This one looks especially promising….
Sept. 19, Tool, Kohl Center: Expect a feast for the eyes as well as the ears as the innovative and unsettling art-metal band plays what may be the hardest show the Kohl Center has ever hosted (aside from KISS, perhaps).
Cubism has always had a bit of an identity problem. As art, it was never quite what or who you thought it was. The fractured human and natural forms had a cockeyed elusiveness, like a guy turning the other cheek, giving you the cold shoulder and the evil eye all at once.
You’d hardly think a Russian — a guy from a social system symbolized by a quasi-cubist hammer and sickle clanking along for the “communist” good — could make this all better for the masses, cultured or otherwise.
That’s why it’s something of a revelation to encounter a persuasive aesthetic answer to several vexing isms, artistic and political, in “Alexander Archipenko: Vision and Continuity,” opening Saturday at the Chazen Museum of Art and running through Nov. 26.
IT HAD already won a prestigious Peabody Award, and last weekend “Two Days in October,” the documentary film based on Madison author David Maraniss’ acclaimed 2003 book, “They Marched Into Sunlight,” captured a Creative Arts Emmy Award.
….The documentary, like the book, focuses on two days in October 1967 in two distinctly different settings – a fierce battle in Vietnam, and the UW-Madison campus, where the anti-war movement was peaking.
It is called “provenance,” which isÃ? the historical record and ownership credentials of works of art and antiquity.
And provenance, the artistic equivalent of pedigree, has become perhaps the hottest, most controversial issue in the art world.
It may be a question of Greek or Roman antiquities that were illegally excavated, sold and exported abroad.
(Chazen Museum of Art director Russell Panczenko is quoted)
For the first time in three years, ticket prices for the University of Wisconsin School of Music Faculty Concert Series,� which will for the second year again be focused on Thursday and Saturday evenings so faculty members can perform with other groups, will increase.
Individual tickets will rise just over 22 percent, from $9 to $11 for general admission, with admission for seniors and non-UW-Madison students going from $7 to $8, for an increase of just over 14 percent. (Inflation for the past three years has averaged about 3 percent a year.)
….”Everything is going up, including printing programs and having the Memorial Union handle computerized ticket sales,” said concert manager Rick Mumford.
Suzanne Ellis’ art was born of love and obsession, manifest as painstakingly realistic renderings of wild animals. But increasingly she senses the realm beyond.
Wisconsin wildcats are the ghosts, be they real cats or not, but so are the memories of all these creatures encountered firsthand by this intrepid artist and nature lover.
This makes her new show, “Wild Wisconsin” in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum’s Steinhauer Gallery, substantially more than your typical wildlife art show.
On the rump of one of the 101 fiberglass cows dotting the area as public art this summer, some loser has deemed it hilarious to spray paint a vulgarity involving the word bull.
Emily Gritt shakes her head.
“It’s sad, very sad, but sort of funny how stupid they are,” she says.
She gets out a sponge and some paint thinner. The graffiti vanishes with a few rubs.
“I love it when it comes off so easy,” she says.
Gritt, 21, a UW-Madison senior and art education major, has one of the more unusual summer jobs.
If you’re looking for a fun and educational field trip to amuse the children, and maybe yourself, on a sunny late summer day, here’s an idea that also involves some sleuthing and discovery.
