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.
Long before Michael Moore took the nation’s temperature with “Fahrenheit 9/11” and Errol Morris cleared away “The Fog of War,” Saul Landau had a camera on his shoulder. The UW-Madison graduate has made over 40 films looking at social and political issues around the world….
Because of his particular devotion to issues affecting Latin America, the Cinefest Nuestra film festival has decided to make this year’s event a salute to Landau’s work.
When judges returned to the Memorial Union Theater Stage Saturday night and announced Madisonââ?¬â?¢s Tangled Up in Blue had taken 3rd place in the Midwest Regional finals of the 2005 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), members of the female vocal ensemble went wild. It wasnââ?¬â?¢t first place, which would have taken them to the National competition at New Yorkââ?¬â?¢s Lincoln Center. That honor went to the tuxedoed dons of Straight No Chaser from Indiana University. ââ?¬Å?But itââ?¬â?¢s way better than we expected,ââ?¬Â Tangled Up in Blue ensemble member Nicki BelSante said.
It took only two songs before the first members of the Wisconsin Union Theater audience got up to dance to the music of Habib Koite and his band, Bamada. The number of dancers grew larger as the evening wore on.
…Koite is lending his image to an Oxfam America brochure calling for caps on federal trade subsidies for U.S. cotton exports to central and west Africa, where local farmers are unable to sell their own crops due a glut of cheap, subsidized U.S. cotton. Oxfam volunteers circulated in the crowd, collecting signatures to send to legislators.
Madison’s third Cuban Film Festival will be held Feb. 24-March 4 on the UW-Madison and Edgewood College campuses. The festival will offer eight films with English subtitles, produced on and off the island in 2003 and 2004.
UW-MADISON graduate student Dave Beck thinks of himself more as a sculptor than a performance artist, but he does not deny the element of performance art that’s in one of two pieces he has in a campus show that opens Saturday night.
The University of Wisconsin announced a new director for the Arts Institute Monday. Susan Cook, professor of music and director of graduate studies in the School of Music will replace retiring communication arts professor Tino Balio.
….On Friday, a 27-year-old UW-Madison student named Maia Patrick Donohue is hosting an exhibit and sale of some 150 paintings, done by orphaned children in Guatemala who were taught by Donohue’s mother, Nancy Donohue, an artist who lives in Fond du Lac.
The show, from 3 to 7 p.m. Friday at the Catacombs Coffee House, 731 State St., is a fund-raiser, the second one Donohue has hosted.
THE MOVIE to be made of David Maraniss’ 2003 book, “They Marched Into Sunlight,” a substantial part of which is set in Madison during the 1967 Dow Chemical riots, now has a studio and writer-director to go along with producer Tom Hanks, who bought the film rights with his partner Gary Goetzman.
If you want to see where some of your tax dollars go when it comes to the fine arts, you might want to take in the new show in the James Watrous Gallery on the third floor of the Overture Center. The public reception for the show, which runs through March 13, is tonight from 5 to 8 p.m.
The exhibit, “In Good Company,” honors the Wisconsin Arts Board visual arts fellows from 2004. They include seven visual artists from around the state. Among them is painter Nancy Mladenoff, a UW assistant professor of art.
NEW YORK — Bob Dylan, the unofficial poet laureate of the rock ‘n’ roll generation, has now been officially placed alongside such literary greats as Philip Roth and Adrienne Rich, not to mention biographies of Shakespeare and Willem de Kooning. All were among nominees announced Saturday for the National Book Critics Circle prizes.
Among the nominees for general nonfiction was UW-Madison Afro-American studies professor Tim Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story.”
Be forewarned: The poems in Jim Ferris’ newly published collection, “The Hospital Poems,” grab the reader by the neck and give a good shake. The collection, which was chosen for the 2004 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, chronicles Ferris’ childhood and teen years, many of which were spent in operating rooms and hospital beds.
Ferris teaches disability studies and communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chris Trumbo’s one-man show about his Hollywood screenwriter father, Dalton Trumbo, is drawn from published letters housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
FORMER MADISON multimedia guy Steve Marmel has a chance to win an “Annie” award when the Oscars of animation are handed out Sunday night in a ceremony at the historic Alex Theatre in Glendale, Calif.
Marmel attended UW-Madison in the 1980s and ran a joke campaign for Wisconsin Student Association president (his party: The Bob Kasten School of Driving).
Their dance is a celebration and an offering, both personal expression and public prayer, a rite of passage and a demonstration of poise.
Bharatanatyam, also referred to as Bharata Natyam in some circles, is a classical dance style that girls in south India study from childhood into womanhood. Unlike their mothers, some no longer give up the dance after they marry and have children.
Inside France, director Maurice Pialat was considered a genius, the heir to legendary French auteurs like Bresson and Renoir. When he died in 2003, he was honored by French President Jacques Chirac, and one critic grieved, “French cinema has been orphaned.”
Outside France, even among Francophile film buffs, few people really know Pialat’s work. This sounds like a job for the UW-Cinematheque.
For the first time, audiences who attend the Wisconsin Film Festival this year will get to honor the films they liked best. Now in its seventh year, the popular festival has given out prizes to filmmakers who were chosen by a jury of filmmakers and film professionals.
For this year’s festival, which runs March 31 through April 3 at several downtown and campus venues, the public will get to hand out an Audience Award as well.
Two grand masters of political filmmaking will be in Madison next month as the CineFest Nuestra Film Festival devotes itself to a retrospective celebration of their work.
Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler, who have both devoted a significant portion of their long careers to making films about Latin American issues, will be the focus of this year’s festival, running in several venues on and off campus Feb. 24-26.
Landau is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s history program.
CHAPEL HILL — A campus committee is leaning toward a book on a southern racial uprising for use as UNC’s 2005 summer reading program text.
A nine-member committee is expected to select “Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story,” by Timothy Tyson. Tyson, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up in Oxford, in Granville County.
Mentions the late UW-Madison art historian Jim Watrous.
Quotes: Tino Balio, UW-Madison film historian.
A new “niche” show of African pottery has been on display at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art since December. It is located in a display case between Galleries IV and V and will be up through Jan. 16.
The curator of the show is Nichole Bridges, a graduate student in art history who is pursuing her doctorate with the internationally recognized UW scholar Henry Drewal.
David Hottman, a longtime professor of voice at the University of Wisconsin School of Music who often sang baritone roles with the Madison Opera, died Sunday afternoon. Hottman, 71, had been in a local nursing home for several months following a stroke. He retired from the university in 1998. Funeral arrangements and plans for a memorial service are pending. (Capital Times)
