A variety of programming is featured on the Davis campus and throughout the region this weekend, which for our purposes, starts Thursday! You can see textiles at the UC Davis Design Museum and the DeYoung in San Francisco (that collection is a bit larger). There are concerts: classical, a bit of Jazz and a play that offers a unique take on Hamlet. Check out the rest. Many events are free.

Karen Nikos-Rose, Arts Blog editor

TriMusica is noon concert

Thursday, Oct. 20, 12:05 – 1 p.m.

Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, a Shinkoskey Noon Concert, Free

Sandra McPherson, clarinet; Susan Lamb Cook, cello; John Cozza, piano

The program includes Jeffrey Hoover: Oneness in this World, Durwynne Hsieh: Elegy for a Sphere, Jessie Montgomery: Peace, Henriëtte Bosmans: Nuit Calme, and Miguel del Aguila: Tango Trio

Link to livestream

Purchase tickets here.

Museum closed Saturday, open Sunday

The Manetti Shrem Museum will be closed Saturday, Oct. 22, to prepare for an annual fundraiser. This event supports the museum’s educational mission, including outreach, programs and exhibitions, keeping them free for all. The museum will be open Sunday, Oct. 23, from 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

This year, the Manetti Shrem Museum honors artist and UC Davis Professor Emeritus Mike Henderson with the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion.

More information here. See column below for the museum exhibits list.

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Weekend at the Mondavi Center

Connie Han Trio in Studio Theatre Thursday through Saturday

Oct. 20, 21, and 22, 7:30 p.m.

Vanderhoef Studio Theatre

Connie Han, Piano; Ryan Berg, Bass; Bill Wysaske, Drums

Weaving in and out of the jazz piano tradition, Connie Han pays tribute to legends like McCoy Tyner, Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Kirkland with her own unique edge at the piano. The New York Times describes her as “the rare musician with fearsome technical chops, a breadth of historical knowledge and enough originality to write tunes that absorb your ear easily.” Her debut, Crime Zone, sounds nothing like a first album, and her follow ups, Iron Starlet, and the 2022 release Secrets of Inanna, prove her staying power. This is an artist who has absorbed the work of her heroes and emerged with a powerful voice of her own.  

Find more information and purchase tickets here. 

Prince Hamlet by Why Not Theatre at Mondavi

Oct. 21 and 22, 7:30 p.m., Jackson Hall

Director Ravi Jain’s remixed, reimagined, and bilingual Prince Hamlet features a cross-cultural, gender-bent cast — challenging traditional ideas of who can tell this story. Interweaving Shakespeare’s spoken text with heightened and poetic American Sign Language, this groundbreaking production creates a visually stunning retelling for both hearing and deaf audiences. You’ve never experienced Hamlet like this before. 

Find more information and purchase tickets here. 

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Armadillo Vinyl Fair is back

Sunday, Oct. 23, 9 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., early birds at 8:30 a.m. for $5

Davis Senior Center

Ongoing at UC Davis Museums

Manetti Shrem — A Trio of Exhibits

‘Young, Gifted and Black’ 

The first public standalone exhibition curated from the renowned Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection explores the history and meaning of Blackness and is organized around four themes: dramatic use of color, reclamation of the color black, materiality (nontraditional materials) and an expanded idea of portraiture. 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) is beloved for his colorful narrative figurative paintings, drawings and prints. Printmaking offered De Forest a means to explore his visual vocabulary — to experiment with the colors, textures and mark-making unique to the medium. 

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. Known primarily for paintings and drawings that map the body through both figuration and abstraction, New York-based artist Loie Hollowell draws from her own life experiences in her work. 

Find more information on all three exhibits here.

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.

An example of the woven cloth being exhibited at UC Davis Design Exhibit. (Courtesy photo)

This exhibition features fine-count Jamdani, the ornate textile that has experienced a revival in Bangladesh.

The Armadillo Vinyl Fair is back, a biannual event where more than 50 vendors from all over Northern California will attend to sell CDs, records, and other music-related items. This year’s fair will be the first since 2019. Find more information here. 

Textiles at DeYoung in San Francisco

Oct. 23 – July 9, 2023

The Julia Brenner Textile Collection will be on view at the deYoung starting this weekend. Between 1923 and 1938, Julia Brenner (1866–1944) donated more than one thousand textile fragments, as well as nearly 200 costume components, costume accessories, complete textiles, and tools, to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). International in scope, with examples of weaves and techniques from around the world, her collection has served as the foundational holding of the Museums’ textile arts collection for nearly one hundred years. 

Born in San Francisco, Brenner married into a prominent Jewish mercantile family who gave back to the city by supporting a wide array of social causes and charitable endeavors. Her donation reflects this sense of civic responsibility, as well as her awareness of museums’ educational missions, her appreciation of textiles as art objects, and the popular early twentieth-century practice of donating art to public institutions for the betterment of society. Brenner hoped that her collection—which she formed in collaboration with private donors, national industrial groups, global textiles manufacturers, and ambassadors and consulates—would serve as an inspirational and educational resource for future generations of museum visitors, particularly those working in the US textiles industry.

The Julia Brenner Textile Collection features a selection of printed textiles, spanning the 18th to the 20th centuries, from Brenner’s collection. Although printed textiles are common to many international traditions, Brenner’s collection is primarily Western, speaking to the tastes of some American textiles collectors and interior designers during her lifetime. Featuring key stylistic and representational printed textiles, it offers a chronology of common designs. By highlighting developments in technologies and dyestuffs while acknowledging recurring patterns and themes, it creates a visual and intellectual dialogue across two centuries of printed-textiles production.

Find more information and purchase tickets here. 

Coming Up

'The Macabre: A Harpsichord Halloween' next week

Thursday, Oct. 27, 12:05 – 1 p.m.

Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, a Shinkoskey Noon Concert, Free

Faythe Vollrath, solo harpsichord and UC Davis lecturer in music

Immerse yourself in the Halloween season with the eerie and spooky sounds of the harpsichord. Spine-chilling chords and cackling runs bring alive a concert of things that go bump in the night, with black cats, Jeckyl and Hyde, and even compositions written by spirits. Featuring works by J.S. Bach, Dominico Scarlatti, James Dorsa, and Rosemary Brown.

The program includes J.S. Bach: Prelude in B Minor, BWV 923, James Dorsa: Jekyll and Hydem, and Domenico Scarlatti: Sonata in G Minor, K. 30

Link to livestream

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