Local political experts, fearing a brutal Senate confirmation battle, expressed relief at President Bush’s choice of relative judicial newcomer John G. Roberts Jr. as his Supreme Court nominee Tuesday night.
“I’m just delighted,” said UW-Madison law professor emeritus Gordon Baldwin. “It’s better than my expectations.”
Gov. Jim Doyle announced today he will use his veto pen to restore more than $11 million in student aids and more than $35 million in general state funding for the University of Wisconsin that had been cut by Republican lawmakers.
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Four former University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administrators earned more than $600,000 total for one-year leaves the school granted after they resigned, a newspaper reported.
The university granted the leaves to three deans and a provost over the past four years, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which reviewed copies of settlement agreements provided by the college.
The UW Board of Regents already is investigating university employment agreements, administrative leaves and backup tenured faculty jobs, which are built into administrators’ contracts in case they lose their primary positions.
The long Fourth of July weekend will find a lot of people over at the Union Terrace, perhaps to go boating or have a brat and beer or to look at Lake Mendota.
While there, they should wander up to the second floor, where the Wisconsin Union Galleries have a major retrospective of Madison painter Robert Grilley up through July 15. (Admission is free; gallery hours are daily, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.)
Lorrie Moore has been named the recipient of the 18th annual Pen/Malamud Award, which recognizes excellence in short fiction. Ms. Moore, who lives in Madison, Wis., and teaches at the University of Wisconsin, will receive a prize of $5,000. Previous winners include John Updike, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty and Grace Paley.
UW-Madison junior Jake Becker gave what he called a “six degrees of separation” explanation for his presence Wednesday at a mass casting call at Memorial Union for extras in an upcoming movie.
The entrance to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union can hardly be called sweeping or dramatic; but soon it will be.
No, not where the ice cream line is; it’s the union’s original entrance, leading to the second floor Memorial Hall. Restored murals, new marble and better lighting will soon make an arts showcase of what for most people has merely been a couple outside doors and a corridor.
Truman Lowe has a longstanding relationship with the Eiteljorg Museum.
A member of the Ho-Chunk tribe and a faculty member in the art department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Lowe has served as an adviser on various museum projects over the years, and is a past fellow in the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art program.
No matter how long a person has lived in Madison, it is common for UW-Madison students to see the same nameless faces passing by them almost daily. They become a part of a routine, and seeing familiar faces can be comforting to students-but faces don’t explain a person’s life story.
On May 6, UW-Madison and the Elvehjem Art Museum accepted $20 million from UW-Madison alumni Jerome and Simona Chazen to fund an expansion of the museum, according to a museum statement.
It is most unfortunate that this commentary did not appear in The Capital Times sooner. I submitted it to the paper via e-mail on Friday, May 13, the day after Jacob Stockinger’s article appeared on the renaming of the Elvehjem Museum, thinking it important that the public have all the facts. Evidently, the dog ate it. I guess these things happen, and I do accept Dave Zweifel’s e-mail apology.
There is no question that Conrad A. Elvehjem was a great biochemist, a respected member of the UW faculty, an outstanding administrator, and, together with his wife Connie, well loved in the Madison community.
And thus it is very appropriate that a building on campus be dedicated in his honor the same way as many buildings are named for distinguished faculty members, deans and administrators. However, there is no particular reason for an art museum to be named for him.
The movie critics for Time magazine, Richard Corliss and UW-Madison alum Richard Schickel, have compiled an unranked list of the 100 greatest films.
Roney, 22, and Drohomyreky, 24, lead The Profits, an acoustic pop band, which in two years has amassed a 400- person street team promoting the group and earned three Madison Area Music Awards. Recently, they opened for the Violent Femmes at UW’s All Campus Party. In addition to gigs around the Midwest, they will host this summer’s Wednesday Night Open Mic at the Memorial Union Terrace.
They didn’t waste any time.
The new Chazen banners are already in place and the old stone wall honoring Conrad Elvehjem has already been cut up and the segment with Elvehjem’s name has been removed. The stone bench with Elvehjem’s name has also been removed from an outside entrance.
Here is a sampler of the reactions to the University of Wisconsin renaming its art museum from the Elvehjem Museum of Art to the Chazen Museum of Art. The total responses – 142 against the name change, six for it – have been edited for length and grammar, but not for opinion.
WARSAW – Mrs. Gail Bell’s Honors English III class at James Kenan High School witnessed an unusual occurrence on Tuesday; Dr. Timothy Tyson, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison came to visit them.
BEN SCHUMAKER was helping out in an orphanage in Guatemala when he had the conversation that changed his life.
This was 18 months or so ago, and Schumaker, 23, had just graduated from UW-Madison with a psychology degree. He found out that a month in a Central American orphanage can affect your psyche every bit as much as four years on a college campus.
As The-Art-Museum- Previously-Known-As-The- Elvehjem changes its name to the Chazen Museum of Art, exhibits remain open for business.
Fittingly, the headline show that bridges the name change is “Clay, Fire, Salt, and Wood,” which runs through June 5. The 74-piece retrospective traces the prolific life and works of Don Reitz, a former UW-Madison professor (1962- 1988) and downright legend in the ceramics world – not to mention the university’s art department.
….Whatever happened to the days of honoring public service, not just private wealth? (I half seriously joke with friends that if you have enough money to buy a public building, you’re not being taxed enough.) Will the UW now sell naming rights to Bascom Hall and Bascom Hill, to Vilas Hall and Witte Hall, to Helen C. White Hall and the La Follette Institute? Why not, if the state deficit gets big enough and state funding small enough?
… let the museum and me know what you think, pro or con, and I will publish the results and pass them on to the museum.
The University of Wisconsin Press, a midsize scholarly house that recently doubled the number of new books it publishes, is losing its top two officials amid a period of financial stress.
Robert Mandel is stepping down as director of the University of Wisconsin Press, effective May 26.
Susan Cook will serve as interim director while the UW-Madison Graduate School conducts a national search for Mandel’s replacement. In the meantime, Mandel will spend a year as a special consultant to the Graduate School.
Mandel said that budget cuts had forced the press to scale back the number of publications. He said that at the time he was hired five years ago, the Graduate School had decided to expand the press.
There is a special pantheon of Olympian celebrities who are famous only because they’re famous: Donald Trump and Paris Hilton aren’t going to win talent shows anytime soon, and when was the last time even Mickey Mouse made a movie?
Mae West is one of these icons; instantly recognizable for no modern reason. Her movies show a one-joke, sniggering, swaggering, thick-set singer whose voice can most charitably be described as “effective.” Her most famous co- star, W.C. Fields, called her “a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra.”
A couple who graduated from Marquette University in the 1950s donated $28 million to their alma mater, while one of the co-founders of Liz Claiborne Inc. and his wife gave the University of Wisconsin-Madison $20 million, school officials announced Friday.
The University of Wisconsinââ?¬â??Madison and Elvehjem Museum of Art announced a $20-million gift from alumni Simona and Jerome A. Chazen to fund a major expansion of the museum. To commemorate the gift, the university said that effective immediately, the name of the museum will become the Chazen Museum of Art. The Elvehjem name, however, will live on ââ?¬â?the present facility will retain its dedication and will be called the Conrad A. Elvehjem Building.
What is the timetable for completion?
Answer: Officials at the Chazen Museum of Art (formerly Elvehjem Museum of Art) and UW-Madison plan to raise $15 million more for the project by fall 2006. The Peterson Office Building is scheduled for demolition in 2007. The entire museum will be done by 2009.
What does Chancellor John Wiley say to anyone who scoffs at a $20 million donation to the art museum when tuition rises and budgets are tightened?
Answer: “That’s a very easy question,” Wiley said. “We’re cutting things that are funded on the base budget of the university. That means the money that comes from the state and from tuition. There is no way anyone should expect private donors to substitute for state money and tuition at a public university. It’s the obligation of the state and the students to provide our base budget. We can ask donors to fund the expansion of the art museum.”
Two UW-Madison alumni with New York-area roots have donated $20 million for a major expansion of the university’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, known now as the Chazen Museum of Art.
UW Chancellor John Wiley said the gift from Jerome and Simona Chazen is a “tremendous new development” and a major step toward the university’s plan to create an arts and humanities district on the east side of campus.
The expansion will involve construction of a new building at the current site of the university’s Peterson Office Building, across the street from the existing museum. The two buildings will be linked by an enclosed skywalk; Murray Street between them will be converted to a pedestrian mall.
A New York couple has donated $20 million to expand the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has renamed the facility in their honor.
With the donation from Simona and Jerome Chazen, the university hopes to finish the expansion project by 2009. The museum is now named the Chazen Museum of Art.
Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison each announced gifts Friday that were among the largest individual donations in the history of the state.
Today, the boat in the sky heads for the water.
Known as a “peapod” for its stout, broad shape, the 13- foot-long Maine lobster boat being launched this afternoon behind Memorial Union is the creation of UW-Madison artist- in-residence Joshua Swan. For the past four months, Swan could be found bending, shaping and planing wood in the art department’s seventh-floor woodshop – dubbed for the duration “The Boatyard in the Sky.”
If you’re lucky enough to have a ticket for one of the virtually sold-out shows of “The Producers” this week, look in the pit.
While touring shows often tap a bit of local talent to round out the orchestra, this show hired 22 local musicians. Actually, they turned to Madison Symphony Orchestra’s GM Ann Bowen and UW-Madison’ School of Music’s Les Thimmig to find the local musicians.
They are not your usual audiences for classical music or dance. They are children in an elementary school. Veterans in a government hospital. Poor students in an inner city school. Residents of a retirement home. People in a homeless shelter. And inmates at a state prison.
What they have in common is being part of a new outreach program designed to get University of Wisconsin-Madison students in music, dance and other fields out into communities across the state, including Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Janesville and Wausau.
Quoted: Emily Auerbach, a University of Wisconsin English professor, reveals experimental bias in copious detail when it comes to the biographers of Jane Austen. (Login required.)
Laura Schaefer, a romantic with an appreciation for history, has found near-perfect work. She writes history textbooks and standardized tests for Learning Express and other publishers. She writes 500-word advice columns for Match.com, an online dating site.
The 25-year-old (a UW-Madison communication arts grad) also has found a way to combine these passions: She has researched the history of personal ads and written a book that compiles some of the most distinctive to ever be written.
Dance is easy to watch if it doesn’t rise above superficial entertainment, choreographer Collette Stewart suggests in “Surrendering Discomfortabilities,” one of eight pieces presented Friday in the UW Dance Program’s spring concert. Add a political or social statement, and the audience may squirm in their seats, Stewart goes on. But once past that initial anxiety, they’ll accept the expanded reality and will better appreciate the art, she says.
Time and again Friday night at Lathrop Hall’s Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space, the audience was challenged to see the connection between the movement of dancers and the often profound message they hoped to convey.
University Theatre business manager and former Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission Chairman Barry R. Robinson died of heart failure Tuesday at his Verona home. He was 49.
Robinson was the business and public relations manager at University Theatre for 25 years. In 2003, he won the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Service to the University.
The area arts community lost a major figure Tuesday when Barry Robinson died of heart failure at age 49.
Robinson, who acted as business and public relations manager at University Theater since 1980 and as chairman of the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission from 1994 to 2004, dedicated most of his life to arts organizations both on and off campus.
Quoted: David J. Bordwell, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment.”
Tom Loeser teaches wood-working and furniture-making in the UW- Madison art department and chairs the department’s graduate program.
Many congratulations are owed poet and fiction writer Rita Mae Reese, an MFA student in poetry in the University of Wisconsin-Madison English department. She recently received two excellent pieces of news, starting with a call from Stanford University letting her know she had won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction.
The event was billed as top-secret. We were to tell no one about it. A capital R, capital S rock star was coming to talk to us about writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison English department.
Before we knew who it would be, there was speculation among my colleagues in the master’s of fine arts program in creative writing. We studied concert lists. We made up elaborate fantasies about who our guest speaker might be.
Finally, copies of Sting’s “Broken Music” were handed out, and we were sworn to triple secrecy. Our guest was the King of Pain himself.
Modern dance means many things to many people. Take three key members of the UW- Madison Dance Program, for example.
Jin-Wen Yu, originally from Taiwan, Li Chiao-Ping, a San Francisco native, and Hawaiian-born Peggy Choy have a wealth of experience, not to mention talent, that they share with students and the community with each passing semester.
Fritz Schomburg is in love with making glass. Its a love he shares with other students at the University of Wisconsin-Madisons glass-blowing lab, an institute of ephemeral art. The public can watch the process from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 16 at the UW Glass Lab free open house and art sale, 630 W. Mifflin St., Madison.
In a hyper-mediated and ultra-commercialized age, where can we find just plain old “folks?”
UW-Madison will explore that question starting Thursday with a 10-day series of music performances, museum exhibits and public lectures called “The Future of Folk.”
Third-prize winner Richard Merelman, attempts to capture the personal side of political struggle with his poem, “The Hostage to His Beheader.” Drawing a record number of 424 participants this year, the Wisconsin Academy Review Poetry Contest has named its three winners.
First-prize winner Slocum will walk away with $500 and a recording session at Abella Studios. Milwaukee poet Kathleen Dale, who placed second, will receive $100 and a $100 gift certificate from McKay Nursery. The third prize of $50 was taken by Merelman, who was a political science professor at UW-Madison for 30 years.
For those who want to enhance their sense of kinship with butterflies, zebras, apes, and even ancient dinosaurs, Sean B. Carroll offers a treasure trove in “Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo.
Carroll is a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The films are back in their canisters. The theater floors have been swept and mopped. The audience’s eyes have adjusted to sunlight again.
The seventh annual Wisconsin Film Festival is over, but memories of the four-day festival and its 160 or so films still linger. Some of the festival’s 150 volunteers were still tallying ticket sales late Sunday, but festival director Mary Carbine said this year’s tally matched and possibly exceeded last year’s record of 24,000 tickets sold.
The Second World War had just ended, and the baby boom, civil rights and women’s movements were still ahead when Ilse Weinberg gathered a group of young University of Wisconsin faculty wives together to share their love of books.
At that first meeting in 1947, they couldn’t have known that a social group with a foundation built on books and lively discussion would grow and thrive, even beyond the lifetimes of many of the original members.
From Uganda to Sudan to UW, professor Harold Scheub shares his stories with students.
KEVIN GONZALEZ, a 23-year-old MFA student in poetry at UW-Madison, learned Monday that he has won the prestigious Playboy College Fiction Contest. Gonzalez won for his short story, “Statehood.”
Four UW film students shooting a school project on the top of a downtown parking ramp with a fake gun Wednesday wound up in a tense confrontation with Madison police that took on the feel of a real Hollywood production.
It ended with the students – plus a non-student “actor” – staring down police firearms, getting placed in handcuffs and being issued stiff citations. All five men were tentatively charged with disorderly conduct and fined $412.
Quoted: Norma Saldivar, an associate professor of theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“….The story traces Davis’ growing up in Chicago and his move to New York, where he got a room across the street from Birdland. He got a job playing bass behind Sarah Vaughan. He came to Madison in 1977.”
Along with their checkbooks and program schedule, those going to order tickets for the Wisconsin Film Festival might want to bring some patience with them.
With no option for ordering tickets online this year, all ticket requests for the immensely popular festival by phone, fax or in person must go through the festival box office at the UW Memorial Union. That’s meant some long waits for patrons, sometimes more than 90 minutes during the first couple of on-sale days.
Film critics and moviegoers alike will gather in Madison March 31 to April 3 for the seventh annual Wisconsin Film Festival.
Madison film fans, get your economy-sized bottles of Visine now. With 151 films spread over just four days, the Wisconsin Film Festival won’t give you much time to blink.
The seventh annual festival, which runs from March 31 through April 3, will kick off with an opening night screening at the Orpheum Theatre of maverick director Samuel Fuller’s 1980 World War II epic “The Big Red One.”
Known for her athletically graceful and lyrically aggressive movement, Li Chiao-Ping is arguably the most famous dancer, modern or ballet, who calls Madison home.
She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, yet tours around the country performing and conducting workshops.
From Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., she and her company will perform “Laughing Bodies, Dancing Minds” in the Margaret D’Houbler Performance Space at Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Ave. (Tickets are $16 for adults, $12 for seniors and students and $6 for children under 13. For information, call 263-5735.)
MADISON ââ?¬â?? It’s not Sundance or Cannes, but the Wisconsin Film Festival is growing in importance in Midwestern arts circles.
Last year, the event screened more than 140 films from 26 countries, including 45 by filmmakers with Wisconsin ties. Moviegoers bought 24,000 tickets, up from 21,000 in 2003.
And, with a cash and in-kind operating budget of $614,000, the four-day festival is of no small economic impact to the capital city.
This year’s event will run from March 31 to April 3 and feature experimental films, documentaries, shorts, independent works and productions by many Badger State filmmakers.
Two of the highest monthly cell phone bills flagged by a state audit were the result of interactive art
An audit of the use of state assigned cell phones by more than nine thousand workers found twenty monthly bills of between $311 and $1456.
27 News has uncovered two of those bills were rung up by patrons of a museum.
In September 2004, several exhibits of artist Xu Bing’s work were displayed at Madison’s Elvehjem Museum of Art.
Museum Director Russell Panczenko said the exhibits included expressions of technology’s influence on our culture.
Panczenko said one exhibit consisted of two state cell phones.
“…Student and professional actors, designers and directors form a successful alliance as Madison’s University Theatre and Milwaukee’s Chamber Theatre collaborate for this production of Shaw’s classic play….”
A Wisconsin prairie in full bloom is the subject of the 2005 Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission art poster.
