The holidays are upon us soon, but there's plenty going on at UC Davis and in the region, arts-wise. And a little note, staff, faculty and student access for tickets to Nina Totenberg starts today. (Okay, not an artist, but she just wrote a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Books are art.). See below. Spend some quality time this week being thankful for the bounty of arts, books and culture we are so fortunate to have in our region.
-Karen Nikos-Rose, UC Davis Arts Blog Editor
Emmet Cohen trio performs Thursday through Sunday
Thursday, Nov. 17, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, Nov. 19, 7:30 p.m.
Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center, UC Davis
During the 2020 lockdown, pianist and composer Emmet Cohen developed "Live from Emmet's Place," a series of weekly performances by his trio and special guests livestreamed from his New York apartment via YouTube. The wild success of the series is based in Cohen’s unique ability to build connections with audiences through his harmonically sophisticated, joyful and open-hearted takes on great tunes. That ability to connect extends to his fellow musicians and with the jazz masters that preceded him, as on collaborations with Ron Carter, Bennie Golson and Christian McBride, just to name a few. His status as a major rising star has recently been recognized in the JazzTimes readers’ poll: Cohen was listed as Artist of the Year and Best Pianist, and his trio was listed as Best Acoustic Group.
Find more information and purchase tickets here.
Also, Mondavi Center adds Nina Totenburg. Tickets go on sale today for faculty, staff and students for her Feb. 3 talk. Regular sales start Friday.
A Conversation with Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent. She appears on NPR’s critically acclaimed news magazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, and on NPR podcasts, including The NPR Politics Podcast and its series, The Docket. Totenberg’s Supreme Court and legal coverage has won her every major journalism award in broadcasting.
Totenberg’s book, Dinners with Ruth, is an extraordinary account of two women, Totenberg and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who paved the way for future generations by tearing down professional and legal barriers. It is also an intimate memoir of the power of friendships as women began to pry open career doors and transform the workplace. Tickets at mondaviarts.org.
At the Pitzer: two concerts Thursday and Friday this week
'Musics of the World' is Thursday afternoon concert
Nov. 17, 3 – 4:30 p.m., free
Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, UC Davis
The performance includers Mariachi UC Davis, Gamelan Ensemble, Samba School, and Bluegrass and Old Time String Band.
Percussion Ensemble performs Friday
Nov. 18, 4 – 5 p.m., free
Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, UC Davis
Chris Froh, director and UC Davis lecturer in music
The program includes Steve Reich: Part I of Drumming, John Alfieri: Fanfare for Tambourines, James Tenney: “Wake” and “Crystal Canon” from Three Drum Quartets,Colin Minigan: Shaped Scattered, and Paul Engle: Cavities
Ongoing at UC Davis Museums
Manetti Shrem — A Trio of Exhibits (Open Thanksgiving Friday)
‘Young, Gifted and Black’
Read more about this exhibition here.
Roy De Forest: Habitats for Travelers
First-generation art faculty member and UC Davis Professor Emeritus Roy De Forest (1930-2007).
Loie Hollowell: Tick Tock Belly Clock
Hollowell, a rising star in the art world, grew up in Woodland, California, and is the daughter of longtime UC Davis Professor Emeritus David Hollowell.
Find more information on all three exhibits here.
Closed Thursday, Nov. 24 (Thanksgiving); Open Friday, Nov. 25
Design Museum:
Woven Air: Dhakai Jamdani Textile From Bangladesh, an exhibition of traditional Bangladeshi textiles noted for a weaving technique that creates surface decorations, opened at the UC Davis Design Museum on Oct. 3. https://arts.ucdavis.edu/designmuseum
Painter Christina Quarles is Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecturer
Nov. 17, 4:30 – 6 p.m.
Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis
Christina Quarles is a painter whose work questions assumptions and beliefs surrounding identity and the human figure.
Quarles was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This year, her work is included in the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art and the 59th Venice Biennial. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College.
Her work is currently on view at the Manetti Shrem Museum as part of the exhibition, “Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art,” on display until Dec. 19. The Thiebaud Endowed Lecture is organized by the Department of Art and Art History and co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.
The Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Lecture in the Theory, Practice and Criticism of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture complements the Visiting Artist Lecture Series and The California Studio, both core components of the Art Studio MFA Program. Wayne Thiebaud’s legacy continues to create art and inspire others after his passing in December 2021. After more than 40 years of teaching and service at UC Davis, his influence will be felt by many future generations, thanks to a $500,000 endowment from the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation.
This weekend in theatre: 'The Fall Show'
Friday, Nov. 18, 7 – 8 p.m.; Saturday, Nov. 19, 7 – 8 p.m.; Sunday, Nov. 20, 2 – 3 p.m., $5
Wright Hall, Main Theatre, UC Davis Campus (see top photo)
The Fall Show, a devised work drawn from Charles Mee’s (re)making project, will be presented by the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance Nov. 18-20 in the Main Theater, Wright Hall.
Directed by Erika Chong Shuch with dramaturgy by Sarah-Rose Leonard, the project turns the stage directions in all the plays written by Mee as a starting place for a devised work directed by Shuch and created in collaboration with a student ensemble. Mee’s stage directions are poetic prompts that can be reimagined as a springboard for a devised, movement-driven performance work. Working with dramaturg Leonard, the performance uses stage directions from selected works that speak to our contemporary moment.
Erika Chong Shuch is a performance maker, choreographer and director whose topic-driven ruminations coalesce into imagistic assemblages of music, movement, text, and design. Interested in expanding ideas around how performance is created and shared, Erika’s work has been performed in city halls, theaters, industrial offices spaces, diners, parking lots and food courts.
Performances begin at 7 p.m. on Nov. 18 and 19, and 2 p.m. on Nov. 20. All tickets are $5. Tickets may be purchased at the UC Davis Ticket Office, located on the north side of Aggie Stadium, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, by phone 530-752-2471 during the same hours, or online at theatredance.ucdavis.edu.
The Department of Theatre and Dance is part of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science.
Purchase tickets here.
UC Davis Symphony Orchestra: Kinetic Energy, Saturday
Saturday, Nov. 19, 7 p.m., Jackson Hall, UC Davis
Christian Baldini, director and conductor
The program of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra includes George Walker: Lyric for Strings, Alejandro Civilotti: Auris Concertum U.S. PREMIERE, and Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka (1947 version).
Faith Ringgold Celebration at deYoung Saturday
Saturday, Nov. 19, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m.
The deYoung museum welcomes museum members, donors, and the general public to the Faith Ringgold Celebration on Saturday, Nov. 19.
Festivities will include a panel discussion, poetry performances, live music and more. See the schedule of events and reserve tickets here.
Throughout her career, Ringgold has drawn from personal and collective histories to both document her life and amplify the struggles for justice and equity. From creating some of the most indelible artworks of the civil rights era to challenging accepted hierarchies of art versus craft through her experimental story quilts, Ringgold has produced a body of work that bears witness to the complexity of the American experience.
Preview: At Pitzer next week
Jazz Combos of UC Davis
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2 – 4 p.m., free
Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, UC Davis
Otto Lee, director and UC Davis lecturer in music
The UC Davis Jazz Combos — usually quartets or quintets — present a wide range of jazz standards, and feature several extended solos with improvisation.
UC Davis Concert Band
Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022; 7 p.m.
The UC Davis Concert Band presents thoughtful works written especially for wind band, and sometimes for film (“My Neighbor Totoro” and “The Polar Express” to name a couple). Constituting members of the UC Davis community from students to graduate students to faculty, the band is proud to represent more than 30 areas of study in its members.
Mail Art Project by Imagining America is open for registration
This year, Imagining America’s Mail Art Project is inspired by the 2022 IA National Gathering theme: Rituals of Repair and Renewal. Peering through the portal of the global pandemic, participants are invited to engage in collective rituals of repair, renewal, and release, by transforming and unlearning that which never served us and manifesting new ways of being together.
This project is open to all IA members — faculty, staff, and students of UC Davis. Participation is free, and IA will mail you a small kit with instructions, a prompt, and a few art supplies and materials to get you started. IA will host an in-person kickoff event for the mail art project as part of the next IA Happening on Thursday, Dec. 1 from 5-7 p.m. in the IA offices at 207 3rd St., Suite 120, Davis.
See Mail Art Project 2021 submissions here. Interested in signing up? Register here! Registration closes on Dec. 16. Questions? Reach out to Trina Van Schyndel, membership director, at tlva@ucdavis.edu.
The Imagining America consortium brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues.
By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.
Imagining America is located at 207 3rd Street, Suite 120 Davis, 95616.
Coming Up:
Department of Art and Art History Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Tarrah Krajnak
Thursday, Dec. 1, 4:30 p.m., Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis
Tarrah Krajnak (b. 1979) was born in Lima, Peru. Her photographs are in collections including the Centre Pompidou and Museum Ludwig. Her book El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (2021) was named to the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural list of 10 photo books of the year. Her work has been published and reviewed in Aperture, Artforum and New York Review of Books. Krajnak is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, Germany, and she has received fellowships from the George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and the Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award. She is an assistant professor of art at the University of Oregon, and living on the unceded territory of the Kalapuya.
Organized by the Department of Art and Art History. Supported by the UC Davis College of Letters and Science and co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.
Read more about the artists and talk series here.
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Karen Nikos, UC Davis Arts Blog Editor, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu