Category: Arts

Tonight at 5 pm is the opening for the reception for the exhibition 'Praxis,' at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

We always love it when our people move on and do well - prizes, awards, appointments and new positions. Now Lamar Dodd School of Art alumna Katarina Burin (BFA '99) has hit two of these at once:

Katarina Burin, who took her conceptual creation of a fictitious Czechoslovakian architect from Berlin to Boston, has won the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2013 James and Audrey Foster Prize.

The $25,000 award comes as Burin, a native of Slovakia, has accepted an offer to become a member of the faculty as lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She’s been a visiting lecturer at Harvard since 2009. The ICA award, she said, will allow her to expand on a project centered around Petra Andrejova-Molnár, a character she created who is rooted in the movements of early-20th-century modernist architecture.

From its rich beginnings in the early 70's as the Pamoja Singers, the University of Georgia African American Choral Ensemble (AACE) has endeavored to keep concert halls and churches filled with the powerful sounds and wealth of indigenous musical treasures birthed from the African American experience. Since its earliest days at UGA, AACE has been a beacon tower of fellowship for the university community. Herein, people of many cultures come to share and learn the messages of hope, love and liberation that have sustained a people and this nation.

This Sunday April 28 the AACE, under the direction of associate professor Gregory Broughton, presents a free concert at 3 p.m. at the Milledge Avenue Baptist Church. The concert is free and the public is invited to attend.

Image courtesy of the UGA Choral Association.

It's a busy time of year but don't forget to get out and see some art! It's the season for BFA Exit Shows in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The Photography, Printimaking and Sculpture show is up for a couple of more days. Next up: Painting and Drawing, Jewelry and Metals, Art X.

Image: poster of and by the sculpture students. See? Good work.

Beginning Thursday April 11, University Theatre offers a new and innovative take on one of the Bard's best:

University of Georgia Theatre will conclude its 2012-2013 season with a media-rich production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" directed by David Saltz. The play will be performed April 11-12 and 17-20 at 8 p.m. and April 14 and 21 at 2:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Theatre.

Saltz, head of the UGA department of theatre and film studies, describes Macbeth as "Shakespeare's most relentlessly gripping and accessible play." Putting a postmodern twist on the Bard's tale of treason and ambition, the University Theatre production will employ large, translucent LED curtains that display animations and video flying into various positions over, behind and in front of the actors to achieve Saltz's vision for freshly staging Macbeth's more sinister and stunning events.

University Theatre teamed with UGA alumnus Rick Clark of EDG (Entertainment Design Group) in Atlanta to furnish the stage with a towering and moveable three-piece, multi-level set.

Interactivity and experimentation have become the calling cards of our theatre department under Saltz and this production will be no different. Our students are learning an age-old craft even as they learn how to build new audiences for it - and for that, the faculty deserves our thanks and attention.

Now "Come, you spirits..."

This is more a Save the Date item but next month the Georgia Museum of Art will host an event that connects the humanities with visual art in a very, well, creative, way:

Professor Judith Ortiz Cofer’s advanced creative writing class presents an evening of readings inspired by works of art in the museum’s permanent collection. The evening features the work of students in ENGL 4800 advanced creative writing workshop, taught by Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing Judith Ortiz Cofer. The students toured the GMOA during spring semester, and each student selected a painting or sculpture on which to construct a narrative piece about that work to read at the May 3rd event. Cofer has included this event as a component of her workshop for several years; last semester she had students select artifacts from the Special Collections Libraries Building, and the students read at that location in December.  More frequently the event has taken place at the Georgia Museum of Art.

Our creative writing program is one of the big attractions of the English department, with a faculty that attracts students from all over. We'll update with more information from Professor Cofer hopefully soon. But for now, the event is at 6:30 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the GMOA.

*Updated*

The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts presents a lecture by assistant professor of art Jon Swindler on Wednesday March 27 at 4 p.m. in room S150 of the lamar Dodd School of Art. The lecture, part of the 2012-23 Fellows Lecture Series in the Willson Center, is titled "This ≠ That: Mediation and Accumulation."

Swindler's talk will focus on
two recent printmaking-based
projects generated during an
artist residency in Venice, Italy.

A printmaker, Swindler is one of our great young art faculty members. And who among us doesn't love Venice? This should be good.

Poet, artist, and art critic Marjorie Welish will read from her work on Monday, March 25 at 7 p.m. in the Ciné Lab located at 234 W. Hancock Avenue. Sponsored by the English department’s Lanier Speaker Series, the event is free and open to the public.

Welish is the author of several books of poetry including: In the Futurity Lounge (2012), Word Group (2004), and The Annotated 'Here' and Selected Poems (2000), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Welish is the recipient of poetry grants and fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University in 2005.

A graduate of Columbia University, Welish received her M.F.A. degree from Vermont College and Norwich University.  She lives in New York City and regularly teaches art, literary criticism, and art history at Columbia University and Pratt Institute and teaches poetry at Brown University.  Her paintings are represented by Bjorn Ressle Fine Art in New York and are in the following public collections: Collection Werner Kramarsky, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; New York Public Library, New York; Rutgers (University) Archive for Printmaking Studios, New Brunswick, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).  Her writing on art has appeared in Art in America, Art International, Art News, BOMB (magazine), Partisan Review, and Salmagundi.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones are legendary performers with a serious worldwide following. Next week he will perform with our own UGA Symphony Orchestra in what I can only term as an extraordinary concert:

Béla Fleck, the world's premier banjo player, for his second Hodgson Hall appearance this season when he returns to perform his new Concerto for Banjo and Orchestra with the UGA Symphony Orchestra on March 26 at 8 p.m. with Mark Cedel conducting. The program also will include Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" and Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.

...

Fleck premiered his Concerto for Banjo and Orchestra with the Nashville Symphony in September 2011. The composer dedicated the concerto to the late Earl Scruggs and has described the piece as "a liberating experience for my efforts as a composer and hopefully for the banjo as well."

 

Since the 2011 premiere, Fleck has performed his new concerto with symphony orchestras around the country, but the Athens concert will be the first time Fleck has performed the piece with a university orchestra.

Nancy Riley, a graduate teaching assistant in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, will give a pre-concert lecture at 7:15 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

With tickets at $25 (students' discouted), this will sell out in no time. In the greater context of dwindling audiences for classical music, this is the kind of innovative programming - without offering the 'pops' repertoire that is so common - we should and can applaud. Plus, it will be a wonderful opportunity for our student musicians.

Keyboard studies are an integral part of the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, and our faculty boasts American and International award-winning performers and teachers that draw some of the best student-musicians to study at UGA. And each year one date in the 2nd Thursday Scholarship Concert Series is dedicated to the piano - and to the piano maker that supplies the Hodgson School with instruments:

More than 25 pianists will join forces for "Steinway Spectacular," March 21 at 8 p.m. in the Hodgson Concert Hall.

The musicians, drawn from the ranks of the Hodgson School's keyboard faculty and students, have selected a broad variety of compositions for the performance, including arrangements of pieces by J.S. Bach, Handel, Gershwin, Wagner and Beethoven as well as original works by Milhaud, Lutosławski, Dahl and Schubert. The concert will culminate in Albert Lavignac's "Galop-March" for four pianos—requiring 24 hands for 352 keys.

"It's a real rarity to see this many pianists onstage at once," said Richard Zimdars, Despy Karlas Professor of Piano at the Hodgson School and one of the evening's performers. "There are interesting logistics in play with multiple people at one piano—simply in terms of space—and half the fun of putting together a program like this is collaborating with others and figuring those aspects out."

The concert, which marks UGA's 10th year as an All-Steinway School, is a celebration of the school of music sharing in the tradition of great American company Steinway & Sons, Zimdars said.