Dance -- on National TV!

Photo of the Week

Millions of television viewers from all over the country will get a glimpse of OSU dancers -- including Erin Hutfilz, Yu Xiao, Boris Willis, Alana Hardison, Gabby Stefura, Jaclyn Thompson, Lauren Mark and associate professor Nicole Stanton -- during the 2007 National Championship football game on Jan 8. The university produced a public service announcement (PSA) that will air during the big game; the 30-second spot features some of Ohio State's best -- from the Buckeye Bullet car that set a land speed record to Troy Smith's Heisman Trophy to OSU Dance ranked # 1! Watch for the spot on the FOX television network.


Notable News

MadLab Gallery has announced a call for entries for its Feb/March Printmaking Show. Deadline is Jan 5 for entries for "Under Pressure: Printmakers and their Process." Interested artists in all printmaking techniques are welcome to enter. There is no fee for entry, and multiple entries per artist are fine. Click here to download a gallery submisison form. Electronic submissions are encouraged at madlabgallery@madlab.net.

Lyrics and text for the hit 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls -- on which the newly released film is based -- were written by Ohioan and OSU alum Tom Eyen. Eyen, who studied at OSU in the '50s, was a dominant figure in the emergence of off-off Broadway in the mid to late '60s and '70s. His papers and manuscripts were presented to the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute after his death in 1991.

Patricia Stuhr (Art Education) along with Phoebe Farris from Purdue University have won an award from the AIS Fund for Innovative Projects. Stuhr and Farris will team-teach a class at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Art Ed alumna Jan Fedorenko, who is principal at Hanby Arts Magnet School in Westerville, has co-authored a chapter in the book Reaching and Teaching Students with Disabilities through Art. The chapter is "Building Collaborative Partnerships."

Ken Rinaldo (Art) spent Thanksgiving break in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Centro Portugues de Serigrafia in a short residency to work on his series the Machinic Diatoms nanotechnological irrealities. These 3D modeled works imagine the day when nanotech machines will enter and help maintain our bodies. During the residency, he produced a series of digital prints for the Estampa Madrid show presented in the Antonio Prates Gallery in Madrid.

Gigaconference to Feature Csuri Work

Photo of the Week

Some of the newest high-definition artwork by Charles Csuri, professor emeritus (ACCAD) -- such as Masks, above -- will be showcased at Gigaconference II, a Chicago-based high-definition videoconferencing event on Tuesday, Dec 5, 5-7 pm. The Ohio Supercomputer Center will provide the technical expertise, equipment and networking to send Csuri's presentation to the conference, and also will be a remote participant. Csuri will be on hand at the Supercomputer Center (BALE Conference Room, 1224 Kinnear Rd) to provide a short discussion about the development of his computer artwork. Other participating institutions include the Chinese Academy of Science, Indiana University, MIT, National Institutes of Health, Texas A & M, University of Helsinki, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and more. For more information, contact Dan Downing at 688-3949.

Notable News

Playwright Nancy Gall-Clayton will join the Theatre Research Institute for the reading of Levels of Living at 7 pm Wedsnesday, Dec 6, at Gallery 202, 38 N. State St in Westerville. See www.osureadings.blogspot.com.

High Street a Capella will perform its winter concert at 6:30 pm Saturday, Dec 16, at Summit United Methodist Church, 82 E. 16th Ave. Admission is one donated can of food, to benefit the Mid Ohio Food Bank. All members of High Street a Capella are current or former members of the OSU Men's Glee Club.

Alumna Barbara Zollinger Sweney (Art Education), who works at the Columbus Museum of Art, received the Ohio Art Education Association 2006 Outstanding Art Teacher Award at the OAEA banquet last month in Cincinnati.

Katherine Borst Jones (Music) performed as principal flutist with Keith Brion and his New Sousa Band in a "Sunday in the Park with Sousa" program in Islamorada, Fla, on Nov 19. She also will perform with COSMOS, a flute, viola and harp trio, this Wednesday in Frankfort, Ohio, for two concerts at the Adena local schools.

The Opera Scenes performance was a sell out! Mozart, Murder & Mayhem completely sold out the 250-seat Roy Bowen Theatre in Drake Performance Center on Nov 21. More than 60 opera fans unfortunately had to be turned away from the popular annual concert. The production included scenes from Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Suor Angelica, Serse, Rigoletto, Mikado and Chicago. Stage Directors were Peter Kozma, WOSU's Christopher Purdy and David Toro. Pianists/musical directors were Edward Bak and Kristin Shoeff.

Celebrate: Dance and Music

Photo of the Week

Student dancers (above) Sydney Ligett, Melissa Nagel, Laurie Atkins and Alana Hardison rehearse for Crossing Terrains, a program of works by visiting and resident artists in the Department of Dance. The evening program, to be staged Friday, Dec 1, and Saturday, Dec 2, in Sullivant Hall Theatre consists of five original dance works and one dance video that cross geographies and eras. Works include those by Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias, Michael Kelly Bruce, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, Vickie Blaine and Zuniga-Shaw, Micheal Estanich and Ming-Lung Yang. For more, click here.

This busy weekend also brings the return of the School of Music's annual extravaganza -- the Musical Celebration Concert. Featuring more than 300 student musicians and vocalists and nearly every ensemble from the school, the fast-paced concert takes to the Mershon Auditorium stage on Friday, Dec 1 at 8 pm.

Notable News

Jeff Haase (Design) recently returned from a conference in Morocco where he presented a paper. The conference was sponsored by CSAAR (Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region), and the theme this year was "changing trends in architectural education.

Ardine Nelson, Mary Fahy and Ann Hamilton (Art) are involved in an exhibition of pinhole photographs and the cameras used to produce them at Ohio Weslelyan University's Richard M. Ross Art Museum, 60 S. Sandusky St, Delaware. The show, Lensless Images & Cameras, features works by 10 artists; it opens Nov 30 and runs through Feb 4. An opening reception is planned 7-9 pm Thurs, Nov 30. For info, call (740) 368-3606.

Extreme Artists

Photo of the Week

When Extreme Makeover: Home Edition calls, this group of artists is ready to rumble. From left, OSU art undergrads Jeremy Nichols and Kevin Duffy along with Columbus artist Craig Dransfield spent much of last Thursday night brandishing paint brushes for a good cause. The TV show had called looking for artists to paint a rap-themed mural in the teenage son's bedroom of a home that was being built for the reality program in Whitehall. The new home, constructed for a 9/11 rescuer and his family, will be featured on the show in February.

Notable News

Kevin Tavin (Art Education) attended the 7th annual Curriculum and Pedagogy annual conference in Texas, where he gave a presentation, Critical, Meaningful and Transformative Art Education: Student Teaching as Action Research. He also has had a chapter published in a collection of papers from the 6th annual conference in Oxford, Ohio.

Susan Powell (Music) was featured soloist with the Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble in Fort Collins, CO, earlier this month. She performed her own composition, Le Carneval Macabre, for solo xylophone/multiple percussion with the ensemble, as well as an arrangement of ragtime pieces. While in Colorado, Powell also presented clinics at several schools.

GL Horton, author of Boston's Brothers in Liberty, has put a discussion about her visit to Ohio State last week online as a podcast. Next week, she'll be adding a discussion with Brad Bartels, the Theatre H101 student who's working on her play. You can listen here. In the previous week's podcast, she talks about the annual retreat held at Ohio State for the International Center for Women Playwrights in very complimentary ways, according to Alan Woods (Theatre).

Robert Ladislas Derr will perform and exhibit in the III International Festival of Electronic Art 404 in Argentina Nov 30-Dec 3. He also performed Remote Control: Cincinnati on Nov 15 in Fountain Square, Cincinnati. The related exhibition runs through Dec 15 at the Pearlman Gallery, Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Let the Sunshine In!

Photo of the Week

The Department of Theatre is gearing up for its musical production of Hair, in collaboration with CAPA, opening Thursday night at the historic Southern Theatre. Rehearsals have been in high gear for the popular show, with actors like Dwayne Blackaller (above) as Claude practicing scenes in Drake before the production packed up and moved downtown. At left are Johamy Morales (l-r), Jessica Podewell (as Jeanie) and ChuYoung Chon. Hair, directed by Steven Anderson, will be on stage Nov 16-22 at the Southern Theatre. Call the Theatre box office at 292-2295 for tickets.

Notable News

An exhibition -- From the 20th Century -- of new works by Michael Mercil (Art) opens Friday, Nov 17, at the Weston Gallery for the Arts in the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. An opening reception is scheduled that evening 7-9 pm. Mercil also will give a talk Nov 28 at 7 pm at the center. The show includes a set of three black stone sculptures (shadows) and three white plaster copies (ghosts) in the gallery's street-level space, which materialize a simple question -- what is the opbject of sculpture now? Featured in the lower west gallery, Mercil configures an assembly of objects, images and ideas that together consider a number of significant 20th century cultural events. For more, click here.

Charles Atkinson (Musicology) recently delivered the opening lecture for the meeting of the International Musicological Society Study Group in Niederaltaich, Germany. Last month, he conducted a guest seminar on Carolingian music theory at the City University of New York. And earlier this month, Atkinson became the 36th president of the American Musicological Society at its annual meeting in LA. Founded in 1934 and now composed of some 3,600 members, the AMS is the leading international association dealing with music as a branch of learning and scholarship.

Charles Massey Jr (Art) is one of the artists included in the curated/invitational exhibition, Drawn to Drawing -- The New Masters, Ohio Masters of the 21st Century at the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, Nov 11-Dec 30.

Robert Ward and Hilary Apfelstadt (Music) were invited to present papers at the inaugural convention of the National Collegiate Choral Organization in San Antonio earlier this month.

James Sanders III (Art Education) is one of a handful of authors featured in a special arts-based education research edition of Studies in Arts Education. That piece, "Performing Arts Based Education Research: An Epic Drama of Practice, Precursors, Problems and Possibilities," reviews the range of innovative research methodologies being developed in the multiple arts.

Art Trio

Photo of the Week

Spotted in the main hallway of Hopkins Hall -- a trio of hardworking undergrads from Sunny Belliston's beginning drawing class. Junior Nate Shipman (l-r), freshman Evan Young and junior Phil Davis were recreating the hallway on their drawing boards.

Notable News

The songs of Ohio composer Robert Saari, set to the poetry of Susan Jenkins Saari, were performed by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington DC on Oct 10. Both Robert and Susan Saari are alumni from our School of Music -- Robert earned a master of music composition, and Susan received a doctor of musical arts and master of music composition from OSU. More than 2,000 people were in attendance for the concert, which was the 2006/2007 Opening Season Celebration of the Washington Performing Arts Society. The concert featured the premier performance of Saari's three-part song cycle, When the Forsythia Bloom. After her performance, Graves introduced the composer and poet to the Kennedy Center audience. The Saaris and their dachshund Otto live in Lebanon, Ohio.

An article by Melanye White Dixon (Dance), "Conversation with Ronald K. Brown: Telling Stories, Keepin' it Real," was selected as a curriculum guide for publication for Ron Brown/Evidence performances at Lincoln Center Institute and some New York City public schools.

Andrea Steele, an online MA student in Art Education, has been selected by the Tennessee Art Education Association for the Museum Educator of the Year Award. She is an educator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.

Christopher Gose (Art) has several pieces in an exhibition, "The Nature of Things," at Pennsylvania's Edinboro University this month. Click here for more.

Terry Barrett (Art Education) gave a talk, "Teachers, Children and Interpretation" at the Children and Visual Culture Symposium in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, last month.

Jack o' Lanterns and Jon Stewart

Photo of the. . . half week

We won't make a habit of TWO blog posts a week . . . but felt these rather timely photos (above and below) warranted an extra report. Above, left, Karen Bell, dean of the College of the Arts, had the enviable task of serving as moderator for last Saturday's event -- An Evening with Jon Stewart and the Daily Show -- at the Schottenstein Center. A huge crowd of students, faculty and staff were treated to video clips and a panel discussion with Stewart (second from left) and his team of correspondents. Stewart is on campus all week to tape The Daily Show in Drake Performance Center; those programs air nightly through Thursday.

And since it is Halloween, check out one of the amazing pumpkins created by Department of Design students as a class project, "light through plane and tone." In the class, taught by Carolina Gill and Tony Reynaldo, students explored the role of lighting and tonal values in 3D perception. Student Chris Eckel created this Salvador Dali pumpkin. Other celeb pumpkins included Dr. Evil, Marilyn Monroe, Stevie Wonder and Audrey Hepburn.

Dance a la mode?

Photo of the Week

Robin Anderson (above), community liaison in the Department of Dance believes in bringing dance to the people. She is organizing a dance "sampler" program at the Gallery Hop in the Short North on Saturday, Nov. 4. The event brings dance to new venues -- in this case, the ice cream shop Emack & Bolio's Ice Cream at 945 N. High St. The evening will feature excerpts and previews of dances that will be peformed at the department's resident and visiting artist performance Dec 1 and 2 in Sullivant Hall Theatre -- including works by Ming-Lung Yang, Michael Estanich, Norah Zuniga-Shaw and Michael Kelly Bruce. The sampler, titled :03 Minute Portions will be presented at the ice cream shop three times that night,
at 7, 8 and 9 pm.

Last weekend, the Men's Glee Club (above) teamed up with the OSU Marching Band to present a football half-time show during the OSU vs. Indiana game, marking the first time the Glee Club has done so in a half-century! They sang two Irving Berlin tunes, accompanied by the band -- Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor (conducted by Bob Ward) and God Bless America (conducted by Jon Woods). According to Ward, the "guys thought it was the coolest thing" to be out on the field.

Notable News

Ohio native and OSU College of the Arts alumnus Bryan Knicely (Art Education) has been named president of the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC), it was announced this week. Knicely currently is assistant director and accessibility coordinator of the Maine Arts Commission, and will begin his work at GCAC in December. The announcement comes after an 8-month national search. A graduate of Otterbein College, he earned an MA in arts policy and administration at OSU.

James Sanders III (Art Education) presented a guest lecture at the Pratt Institute for the Arts in Brooklyn, NY, earlier this month titled "Queering Arts Education." He also participated in celebrations surrounding the opening of artist Nicholas Cave's exhibition Soundsuits at the Jack Shainmen Gallery in the East Village. Sanders had written the exhibition catalog's intro and essay "Soundsuit Serenade" when the catalog was first released at the exhibition's first showing in Chicago last spring. The catalog is part of a larger "Boxfolio" that includes Cave's haute couture images on blow-up toys, iron-on transfers, posters, a little black book and other objet d'art.

Vera Maletic (Dance) was an invited presenter at the recent conference "Bratislava in Movement/Laban for the 21st Century" in Slovakia.

Ken Rinaldo (Art & Technology) was interviewd by Angela An on WBNS-TV/Channel 10, and presented two of his Spider Bots to the TV audience. Also this month, Rinaldo exhibited a piece in Norway, and his work was presented at an art and technology conference in India.

Robert Ladislas Derr (Art) is one of 30 artists selected for the Photographic Resource Center's "PRC/POV: Photography Now and the Next 30 Years," an exhibition in Boston Nov 2-Jan 28 to showcase artists likely to make a significant contribution in the next three decades.

Tales from the Beanfield. . .

Photo of the Week

Michael Mercil (Art), above, read the essay “The Beanfield” from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as part of the OSU Library ReadAloud program on Oct. 12. The reading was in celebration of the harvest from Mercil’s Beanfield – an organic public art project outside the Wexner Center. Next week, Mercil is artist in residence at the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron, where he will produce large-scale plaster casts from three carved stone sculptures he completed last February in Sweden. Recent MFA grad Candace Black will be Mercil’s technical assistant during the residency.

Below, a photo of the Margo Jones Award presentation. On Sept 28 at the Beverly Hills Hotel in LA, OSU Libraries and the College of the Arts presented the Margo Jones Award posthumously to the playwriting team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. The award honors those who have demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting and who have encouraged the living theatre everywhere. A highlight of the celebration was the reading of a scene from Inherit the Wind by noted actors Edward Asner and David Selby, directed by Gordon Hunt. In the photo are, standing: Alan Woods, Jenny Lee, Neila Lee, Jonathan Lee, Lucy Lee, Karen Bell and Nena Couch. Seated: Deborah Robison, Janet Waldo Lee and Joshua Robison.Notable News

Over the summer, Reinhart Butter (Design) accompanied a group of Industrial Design students – including five seniors and one German exchange student -- to an international conference on vehicle seating safety in Nuernberg, Germany. The trip stemmed from a quarter-long project last winter that was sponsored by Caterpillar Inc., and where student teams developed vehicle seating concepts for the company. That collaboration was coordinated through OSU Design alumna Ashley Menges, who is now a senior designer at Caterpillar. Butter, who had been invited to the conference to make a presentation on safety issues, chose to highlight excerpts from the collaborative class project. In addition, he was named a member of the Car Training Institute conference advisory board after his last year’s presentation comparing vehicle seating for the European market with those in the North American region.

The Arts Scholars Program has a study abroad opportunity to Merida, Mexico (Yucatan peninsula) next March, and several spots are available for other College of the Arts students who are not Arts Scholars. Applications are due Oct 30, according to Connie De Jong, program coordinator. The short-term study abroad opportunity, which is preceded by a preparatory arts course, will focus on interdisciplinary arts and cultural arts traditions, using Mayan culture as its theme. For more information, contact De Jong at 292-6084; an application form is available here.

Robert Ladislas Derr (Art) lectures about his work at the Seeing the City Panel at the Trans Visual Culture Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, on Oct 20. He will exhibit in Fonlad 06, Bissaya Barreto's Foundation, in Coimbra, Portugal, Nov 3-26.

Friends of Goodale Park and the BrickStreet Arts Association will host “An Afternoon of Art, Great Jazz, Food and Friends” to kick off the final phase of fundraising for Tête-à-Tête Falls in Goodale Park. The event is 3-6 pm Sun, Oct 29, at Mahan Gallery, 1042 N. High St. The afternoon will include music by the Derek DiCenzo Trio, food and drink from local restaurants, a silent auction and an informal discussion of the project. Tête-à-Tête Falls is a water feature by Malcolm Cochran (Art) commissioned for the lake in Goodale Park. It consists of a split-face granite block to be sited in the north lobe of the lake; water pumped to a trough at the top of the form will cascade over weirs on the interior sides of the structure, creating twin horseshoe waterfalls. The falls will be a year-round water feature, designed also for winter months when ice will form in constantly shifting ways. Construction is planned for summer 2007. OSU Architecture faculty members Beth Blostein and Bart Overly are spearheading an effort to raise significant funds for the project in memory of Paul Cianelli, who was instrumental in getting fountain project started. For more, see the invitation or click here.

Summer in Brazil...

Photo of the Week

In the “What I Did Over the Summer” category: Nine graduate students in the Department of Art Education traveled to Brazil in June to study at the Federal University of Goias. The partnership involved the Department of Art Education, the University of Cincinnati and Leda Guimaraes, professor and program director in Brazil; the trip was funded in part by the College of the Arts and Department of Art Education. Students taught in the university Lab School and soaked up the local art and culture for almost two weeks. The trip was co-directed by Vesta Daniel and Christine Ballangee-Morris (Art Education), who say this type of international exposure helps make the students better teachers, helps them grow and helps them learn new ways to approach activities. In the photo above, taken in front of the Catedral Metropolitana de Brasilia, are (l-r) Emily Figuroa, Christine Ballengee-Morris, Leandro Garibaldi ( a local friend), Amanda Alexander, Megan Moriarty, Gregg Montgomery, Lindsey Evrard, Vesta Daniel, Nina Siriano, Sarah Grosh (seated) and Dana Carney.


A recent project directed by new faculty member Jimmy Bohr (Theatre) was featured in the Oct 10 New York Times. The project involved a performance based on the first story in Awake in the Dark, a collection of stories about the Holocaust by Shira Nayman. Bohr directed the performance on Oct 10 at St. Francis College Theatre in Brooklyn Heights. The performance included an actress and a trio of piano, clarinet and viola.

Norah Zuniga Shaw (Dance) and Matthew Lewis (ACCAD) recently had a journal article published in Performance Research, Vol 11, No 2, June 2006. The article was “Inflecting Particles: locating generative indexes for performance in the interstices of dance and computer science.”

Katherine Borst Jones (Music) will appear with the Cypress String Quartet in a Chamber Music Columbus concert at 8 pm Sat, Oct 21, at the Southern Theatre. The program includes music of Mozart, Ruehr, Schostakovich and Schulhoff. Call CAPA for ticket information, 469-0939.

Robert Ladislas Derr (Art) presented his artwork for the Critical Cartography Roundtable on Oct 14 at the 13th Annual Critical Geography Mini-Conference at Ohio State. Later this month he exhibits in Visualizing TRANS at the Kupfer Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Click here.

The Grouch Among Us

Photo of the Week

Mark Shanda (Theatre) cozies up with the not-so-grumpy Oscar the Grouch and his alter-ego Caroll Spinney on Friday, Sept 29, when Spinney and his characters came to campus. The Department of Theatre hosted “A Conversation with Caroll Spinney, Sesame Street’s Living Legend” in Thurber Theatre for about 100 students, where he shared many anecdotes about his life as a puppeteer. Spinney was in Columbus for the opening of WOSU @ COSI. He has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show began in 1969, and is the author of The Wisdom of Big Bird (And the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers.

Notable News

The short play, Last Call, by Alan Woods (Theatre) was performed at the Asphalt Jungle Shorts Festival in Kitchener, Ontario, over two recent weekends. Another short play by Woods called Who’s Herbert? was performed at the Senior Theatre League of America conference in St. Louis. And his readers’ theatre piece, The Joys of Spam, will be staged this week by the Madison, Alabama, Children’s Theatre Company.

A work by Christopher Gose (Art) was selected to be in a juried show for members of the Southeastern College Art Conference and the Mid-America College Art Association. The exhibition coincides with a conference for the two groups at Vanderbilt University. Forty four works were selected from more than 200 submitted for the exhibition, which is on view at The Parthenon in Nashville Oct 26-Jan 20.

On Oct 7, Michael Mercil (Art) addresses the Sixth Annual Conference of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, held at the Ohio State House and Renaissance Hotel. His talk is “Living Culture: Project, Process, Proposition.” And on Thurs, Oct 12, the OSU Library ReadAloud program features a reading of the essay “The Beanfield” from Thoreau’s Walden, in celebration of the harvest from Mercil’s Beanfield project. The free event will take place at the Beanfield adjacent to the Wexner Center.

Terry Barrett (Art) conducted demonstration critiques for the Department of Art and Design at the University of Michigan last month.

An article by Melanie Bales (Dance) will be published in the Journal of Dance Education‘s November issue. It is called “Body, Effort and Space: A Framework for Use in Teaching.”

Pat Woliver and Loretta Robinson (Music) and guest artists Robert Bode and Lee Thompson, Whitman College, premiered Comrades: A Retrospective, a program of poetry and song based on the writings of Walt Whitman, at the OSU/Port Clinton Performing Arts Festival last month. They also will present the program at 3 pm Jan 14 at OSU’s Longaberger Alumni House.

Thomas Wells (Music) was host and organizer for the 2006 national conference of the 1,500-member Society of Composers Incorporated. The San Antonio conference featured performances of 80 compositions for orchestra, wind symphony, chorus, chamber ensembles and electroacoustic music. Wells and James Hill (Music) also performed on the program. Wells has served as president of the society since 2002.

Lecturer and alum Gene Felice (Art & Technology) and Nathan Ober have established a web-based and interactive control center at a Cornell University museum of art, and have developed an exhibition installation that opens Oct 14 at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU. This video/tech-based exhibition creates an imagery support network, showing various video feeds from installation spaces in Ithaca, Columbus and Chicago, all controlled through touchscreen computer interfaces in kiosks. The project involved more than 30 artists in the three cities. Click here for more.

Festival by the Lake

Photo of the Week
Theatre MFA alumna Lise Evans staged her one-woman show about Annie Oakley at the third annual OSU/Port Clinton Performing Arts Festival Sept. 13-17 in the northern Ohio town. More than 40 performances were featured at the festival in 12 nontraditional venues in downtown Port Clinton, with more than 100 artists from Ohio State and elsewhere taking part. The festival is a collaboration with OSU’s Department of Theatre and the city of Port Clinton, and features performances in dance, music and theatre, and visual arts activities. Below, John Giffin (Dance) demonstrates all the right moves in a workshop on ballroom dancing. (Photos by Jo McCulty)

Noel Mayo, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Design, has been honored with the 2006 IDSA Educator Award, presented by the Industrial Design Society of America at its annual professional conference in Texas earlier this month. IDSA presents a US educator with the award in recognition of significant and distinguished contributions in industrial design education.

Gregory Proctor (Music) was a special invited guest speaker for the Mannes Chromaticism Institute at Yale in June.

OnCampus newspaper recently published a list of Ohio State Buckeyes Changing the World, which included a top-10 list of famous OSU grads and a top-10 list of Buckeye athletes. The 10 famous grads included three from the College of the Arts: Eileen Heckart (Theatre), screen and stage legend; Charles Csuri (ACCAD), father of computer animation; and Roy Lichtenstein (Art) pop art pioneer.

Terry Barrett (Art Education) recently gave a workshop at the Rhode Island School of Design for a teacher–development event, “Art + Writing: Literacy through the Visual Arts. The head of the Department of Art + Design at the Rhode Island school is alumnus Paul Sproll.

An essay by Paul Nini (Design) appears in the new collection Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design, edited by Audrey Bennett. See the website here. Nini will be presenting a talk this week at the conference, About, With & For: Advancing the Practice of User-Centered Design Research.

First Day of School

Photo of the Week

On Ohio State's first day of classes, College of the Arts staffers -- including Tricia Fairman (above), music education major and student assistant in the arts communications office -- camped out on the Oval to distribute "Crave Art" frisbees, gum and arts events calendars. Tricia stopped to chat with fellow School of Music students Mike Leone (left) and Matt Kennedy, both members of the Phi Mu Alpha music fraternity and the OSU Marching Band. Meanwhile, Lizbeth Roberts (below, left) a freshman music major from western New York, calmed her pre-audition jitters outside the Weigel Hall stage on Audition Day by chatting with junior music education major Christine Malloy.


Notable News

Bebe Miller (Dance) and her creative team – which includes Vita Berezina-Blackburn (ACCAD), dance alum Angie Hauser and Kathleen Hermesdorf who will be a visiting artist in dance this fall at Ohio State -- were awarded a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance) Award Sept. 17 in New York. The annual awards recognize outstanding creative work by independent artists in the fields of dance and related performance in New York City, and are on par with the coveted Tony awards in theatre. Miller and her team won a Choreographer/Creator award for Landing/Place at Danspace Project. It is the second Bessie for Miller, who also earned one in 1986. Additionally, dance alumna Dianne McIntyre received a Special Citation at the Bessie presentation for her pioneering work with women, and with African-American and American spiritual traditions in dance. For more, see the Danspace website.

An opening reception is planned Fri, Sept 29, 6-8 pm for Charles Massey Jr (Art) and his exhibition "Making Secrets' Visible - Everything Counts" at the OSU Faculty Club. RSVP to 292-2262. The exhibition of prints and drawings continues at the Faculty Club through Oct 20.

Ken Rinaldo (Art + Technology) will give a presentation at the first Dorkbot Columbus Event at 6 pm Oct. 17 in the Wexner Center Film and Video Theatre. Admission is free. Rinaldo will present an overview of his work, including the Autotelematic Spider Bots. Dorkbot – with sites in other cities around the nation – is an organization that fosters discussion among people “doing strange things with electricity in Columbus,” according to its website. Find out see the Dorkbot website.

WOSU 89.7 FM will broadcast Music in Mid Ohio each Sunday evening at 7 pm. Programs throughout the month of October feature "Music from Ohio State."

Dave Covey (Dance) is designing lighting for a new piece by alumna and award winning choreographer Dianne McIntyre called Lyric Fire, based on the poems of Dayton native Paul Laurence Dunbar, for Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Performances are at 8 pm Oct 7 and at 3 pm Oct 8 at the Victory Theatre in Dayton.

Robert Ladislas Derr (Art) is exhibiting in a gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, through the end of the month. He also will exhibit Chance: Bloomington for the Perform.Media Exhibition at Indiana University through Oct 14, with a performance segment to take place at the exhibition’s opening on Sept 29.

Mark Fullerton (History of Art and associate dean) delivered a lecture at Cornell University Sept. 21 as the Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen Lecturer sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America. His talk was titled “Cameo Appearances: Augustus, Roma and the Julio-Claudian Clan.”

Amy Youngs, Ken Rinaldo (Art + Technology) and art MFA alumnus Fernando Orellana are in a group show in Chicago at the Glass Curtain Gallery called Inactive/Active through Sept 29. Youngs will give a lecture at the gallery at 6 pm Sept. 28. She also has a show – Amy Youngs: Intra-Terrestrial Soundings – at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Mich, through Oct 13. The show offers visitors the opportunity to tune into and experience the vibrations created by our tiny, soil dwelling creatures -- worms. Click here for more.

Sunflower Murals are Up!

Photo of the WeekNine enormous colorful acrylic paintings created over the past few weeks by MFA student Sarah Weinstock and her team of painters -- including Katie Niewierski (left) and Carly Glisson -- were mounted last Friday on the exterior wall of the new Sunflower Market at South Campus Gateway. The Minneapolis-based organic and natural foods market contacted the Department of Art over the summer, offering funding to commission a one-of-a-kind, student-created artwork to spruce up the outside wall facing 9th Avenue. Sarah came up with the plan of creating ultra-close-up views of fruits and vegetables, which focus on the intricate, circular growth patterns on plants like (above) sunflowers, pomegranates and mushrooms. The paintings, completed on 4 by 8 foot birch panels, were permanently installed in three building-size windows at the market. For more on Sarah's summer painting project see Sarah's blog.

Here is a photo of the paintings being installed last week:



Notable News

Two alums from Music -- Kerri Marcinko (BM and MM) and Maureen McKay (MM) will debut this fall with the New York City Opera, reports Robin Rice (Music). Both will perform major roles; see details on the opera's website:
Marcinko
McKay

Kevin Tavin (Art Education) presented a talk Sept 11 at Bowling Green State University about "The Terr(or)itorialization of Art Education: Visual Culture in the Age of Permanent War."

Three OSU MFA alumni in theatre design were recognized for their outstanding designs at the 2006 U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology Design Exhibition (USITT). They are Linda Pisano for her costume design of Doctor Fautus for the Utah Shakespearean Festival; Dennis Hassan for his co-production design for Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris for Utah State Theatre; and Madeleine Sobota for her set design of A Mouthful of Birds for Butler University Theatre.

David Frego (Music) completed a gig last week with Cirque du Soleil. Frego was in Florida working with singers and actors from the troupe and the University of Central Florida to help syncronize their movement and music.

Terry Barrett (Art Education) and grad students Valora Blackson, Vicki Daiello and Megan Goffos recently had an article, "God, the Taboo Topic of Art Education" published in The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 26(1), 58-84.

Alumnus Geary Larrick (B Sc, Music, 1965) of Stevens Point, Wis, has authored his ninth book, An Autobiographical Bibliography of Percussion Music, published by the Edwin Mellen Press. He performs regularly in central Wisconsin on percussion and piano.

Ann Hamilton (Art) will participate in a series of contemporary art exhibitions at the Luang Prabang National Museum in Laos in October. The event, The Quiet in the Land, includes exhibitions, workshops, celebrations and visits to the 24 monasteries in the area, and coincides with the end of the rainy season there. Hamilton's work -- The Meditation Boat -- will be launched Oct. 9. In addition, Hamilton recently received an Ohioana Citation for art from the Ohioana Library as part of its 2006 awards.

If you have news to share about faculty, staff, student or alumni activities, please send them to Victoria at osuarts@osu.edu