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