The Templeton Colloquium in Art History: Race, Museums, Art History
Friday, Feb. 19, 4 p.m., free, via Zoom. Register.
American cultural institutions are an integral part of the broader discussion of racism taking place in our society. Museums powerfully communicate cultural values, including racially based notions of difference. Can the museum be a space of anti-racism, and can the discipline of art history help to achieve that? If so, what are the challenges and concerns? The 2021 Templeton Colloquium focuses on these questions to better understand the relationship between the display of art and racial privilege. Speakers will include Professor Bridget Cooks of UC Irvine, author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011), and Dr. Susan Mullin Vogel, a curator, filmmaker and expert on African art whose most recent book is El Anatsui: Art and Life (revised and expanded Second Edition, 2020). After brief presentations by each of the speakers, the conversation will be moderated by Michael Yonan, professor of art history and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in European Art, 1600–1830.
The Templeton Colloquium in Art History series is made possible by the generous support of Alan Templeton (‘82) and organized by the Art History Program in the Department of Art and Art History. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum. We’ll have more details in next week’s Arts Blog.
Read this story for more details about this event.
Smithsonian’s ¡Printing the Revolution!’ conversation series features Montoya
Thursday, Feb. 18, 3:30 p.m, free, via Eventbrite. Register.
The activist and the cultural dimensions of the civil rights era fueled solidarity movements between Black and Latinx artists, leaving a visible imprint in the graphic arts that continues to reverberate today. This online panel features three artists from ¡Printing the Revolution! who have engaged with these concerns across the decades. This event by Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery features two California artists, as well as a California moderator.
Participants include:
Malaquias Montoya, a professor emeritus of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis and a prolific strike poster artist whose artwork defines the 1960s social serigraphy movement of the Bay Area. His artwork supports international solidarity, criminal justice reform, and the ongoing struggle for social justice.
Favianna Rodriguez, an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and activist, based in Oakland. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. (She will also speak at the SFMOMA event. See below).
Moses Ros-Suárez, an artist, printmaker, and architect, and a member of the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, a collective of Dominican American graphic artists.
The panel will be moderated by Kaelyn Rodríguez, assistant professor in art history at Santa Monica College.
More information here.
SFMOMA artist talk features Favianna Rodriguez tonight
Thursday, Feb. 18, 6 p.m., free, via Zoom. Register.
Hear from artist and social justice activist Favianna Rodriguez on advancing cultural change through visual activism. In this online talk, Rodriguez will broadly explore her practice, from finding her own artistic path to how her projects build public will towards radical social transformation.
About the Artist
Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom, boldly reshaping the myths, stories, and cultural practices of the present, while healing from the wounds of the past. Her practice includes visual art, public art, writing, and meaningful collaborations with social movements that lead to resilient and transformative cultural strategies.
This event is hosted by SFMOMA in partnership with City College of San Francisco. To find out more about this event, go here.
Shinkoskey Noon Concert introduces ‘Quartets by Joseph Bologne and W. A. Mozart’
Thursday, Feb, 18, 12:05 p.m. to 1 p.m., free, via UC Davis Music’s Youtube Channel (and viewable anytime).
Dagenais Smiley, violin and UC Davis lecturer in music
Chase Spruill, violin
Cassandra Lynne Richburg, viola
Ellen Ruth Rose, viola and UC Davis lecturer in music
Susan Lamb Cook, cello and UC Davis lecturer in music
Program —
Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges: String Quartets in G Minor and C Major, from Six Concertante Quartets
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quintet in G Minor, K. 516
To learn more about this event, go here.
Next week, ‘Arcomusical’
Thursday, Feb, 25, 12:05 p.m. to 1 p.m., free, via UC Davis Music’s Youtube Channel.
Projeto Arcomusical, a world music sextet reimagining the Afro-Brazilian single-string instrument called the berimbau, will premiere pieces by five doctoral students in composition.
Gregory Beyer, director
Paul Engle: Air of a D String
Orkun Akyol: isto é muito natural
Joseph Peterson: Wretched
Sarah Wald: Double Toil, Double Coil
Jacob Lane: The Details of a Place
Juan Diego Díaz: Berimbau Music: Homage to Steve Reich
To learn more about Acromusical and this event, go to the UC Davis department of music website.
UC Davis play explores incarceration Friday
The UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance and Catalyst: A Theatre Think Tank presents A Bee in a Jar by Andrew Nicholls. In this play, three men with very different temperaments try to figure out why they were seized a month earlier and locked together in a featureless room. The play will be performed free online Friday, Feb. 19 and 20 at 6 p.m. PST.
Nicholls is a television writer and author who has worked on The Tonight Show and numerous Nickelodeon shows. He is the author of the recently published COMEDY WRITER: Craft Advice from a Veteran of Sitcoms, Sketch, Animation, Late Night, Print and Stage Comedy. His play {LOVE/logic} was staged at UC Davis in 2019.
Theatre and television actor Laura Hall, who appeared on Broadway in Wonderland and in the national tour of the revival of Pippin, is the director. She has recently relocated from New York to Sacramento County.
The cast includes alumni Jordan Brownlee (B.A., cinema and digital media ’20), Nate Challis (B.A., theatre and dance, ’20) and Noah VanderVeer-Harris (B.A., theatre and dance, ’20), as well as undergraduate students Erolina Kamburova and Hailey Peterson. Undergraduate student Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz is the stage manager.
More details about the event here.
A virtual new works festival this year, Catalyst’s online process allows actors and creative teams to collaborate from various locations across time zones. Broadway veteran Mindy Cooper, UC Davis professor of theatre and dance, and Lisa Quoresimo (Ph.D., performance studies, ’18) are co-founders of Catalyst.
For details about access to the play and other events, visit here.
Pence Gallery continues with art history lecture series
Saturday, Feb. 20, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., free, via Zoom. Register.
Pence Gallery’s monthly art history lecture series features Dr. William Breazeale, curator of European Art at the Crocker Art Museum. Breazeale takes a closer look at the Crocker's collection and discusses how a museum collection is built in many ways, through gift, bequest, and purchase. Unlike private collections, which can be built based on individual resources and personal taste, public collections involve many additional challenges including historical appropriateness, the collection's previous composition, and new opportunities offered by the market.
Heartbeat Opera at Mondavi Saturday
Saturday, Feb. 20, 7:30 p.m., $0-$15. Buy tickets.
Opera is an artistic medium that articulates and confronts human passions with powerful immediacy. This conviction is what drives Heartbeat Opera’s desire to rejuvenate opera and to transform its recognized masterpieces from venerated relics into freshly challenging encounters.
Breathing Free builds on Heartbeat Opera’s 2018 collaboration with 100 incarcerated singers in six prison choirs, part of a contemporary Fidelio told through the lens of Black Lives Matter. Now, in the turbulent wake of George Floyd’s murder and in the grip of a pandemic which is ravaging our prison population, Heartbeat curates a song cycle brought to life by three singers, three dancers, eight instrumentalists and the use of vivid music videos, mingling excerpts from Beethoven’s Fidelio with songs by Black composers and lyricists, which together manifest a dream of justice and equity. Additional support for the creation of Breathing Free generously provided by The Mondavi Center at UC Davis.
Get a sample in this video.
The premiere of this show is on Saturday, Feb. 20, 2021. It will be streaming on-demand through Feb. 27, 2021. Once you have purchased the event, it will be viewable in the account section of your Mondavi Center Account between Feb. 20 at 7:30 p.m. and Feb. 27 at 11:59 p.m. You will be prompted to login. This show is free for UC Davis students and $15 regular price.
Learn more about this event here.
YoloArts presents an online exhibition, ‘The Good Earth: Farms and Fields from California to Cape Town’
Gallery 625, curated by YoloArts, is committed to supporting the continual growth and development of the arts in Yolo County by providing space and opportunity for the exhibition of arts. The gallery provides a diverse selection of artistic mediums by emergent to established artists. The current exhibition includes 34 acrylic paintings and drawings by Margaret Eldred. Read the artist statement and check out the online gallery.
Broadway Sacramento video looks back at Peter Pan
One of the highlights of the 2015 Broadway At Music Circus season was Peter Pan, the beloved musical about the boy who wouldn’t grow up. This heart-warming production of this magical journey to Neverland was led by members of the creative team from the Tony-nominated Broadway production and a cast of Broadway veterans, including Jenn Colella, who made her Broadway At Music Circus debut in the title role, and audience favorite Paul Schoeffler, who played Mr. Darling/Captain Hook. Join Jenn and Paul as they recall some of their experiences working on the show, along with Flying Sequence Choreographer Paul Rubin, who brought his renowned special effects skills to Broadway At Music Circus to enable Peter Pan and the Darling children to take flight. Watch the video here.
Art Social Media of the Week
We came across the UC Davis Basement Gallery’s Instagram post of a UC Davis student’s artwork, reminding us to check out the BG’s newest podcast here.
