History of Art & Visual Culture

HAVC professor wins Pease PrizeCarolyn Dean, History of Art & Visual Culture professor, and Smith College Professor Dana Leibsohn received the Franklin Pease G. Y. Memorial Prize for the best article published in Colonial Latin American Review in 2003 and 2004. Their article "Hybridity and its Discontents:  Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America" (Colonial Latin American Review 12.1, June 2003), previously received the 2004 Conference prize for the best article on Latin American history from the American Historical Association Conference on Latin American History.
The jury for the 2003-2004 Pease Prize praised the article as "well written, thoughtful, wide-ranging, and interesting," with one reader observing that in the essay "a winning combination of erudition and theoretical deconstruction humbles the contemporary scholar into accepting the complexity of a reality that will never completely unveil its mysteries." The Pease Prize was announced in the December 2005 issue of the journal.
In other news, Dean’s essay "Inka Nobles: Portraiture and Paradox in Colonial Peru" appeared on pages 79 to 103 of “Exploring New World Imagery,” which was edited by Donna Pierce. (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2005)

Jansen presents paper to British Archaeological Association

Virginia Jansen, History of Art & Visual Culture professor, presented the paper, "Trading Places: The 'Steelyard' of King's Lynn and Warehouse-Inns of the Middle Ages," at the annual meeting of the British Archaeological Association in King's Lynn, England, in July. The paper compared the late fifteenth-century Hanseatic warehouse in King's Lynn, the only surviving example in England, to similar examples in Venice (fondaco) and Turkey (funduq). These structures housed merchants and their goods, somewhat like Embassy Suites today, and served as foreign enclaves for the traders.

Crane selected as Visiting Scholar by Canadian Centre for Architecture

Shelia Crane, History of Art & Visual Culture assistant professor, has been invited to be a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal during winter and spring quarters. As a fellow at the CCA, Crane will be advancing research on her book project, "Mediterranean Borderlands at the Ends of Empire: Decolonization and Architectural Translations between Algiers and Marseille."
The CCA brings together international scholars from a variety of fields who are engaged in research on architecture.

Berger’s new book explores racial identity and the visual world

"Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), written by History of Art & Visual Culture associate professor Martin Berger, explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through an analysis of late-nineteenth– and early-twentieth–century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, it considers how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what European Americans see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.

Music

Kim receives 2005 Fromm commission

Hi Kyung Kim, associate professor of Music, was one of fourteen composers selected by the Board of Directors of The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University to receive a 2005 Fromm Commission Award. Recipients receive a $10,000 commissioning fee as well as performance fees and stipends.
According to the Fromm Music Foundation, these commissions are one of the primary ways that it seeks to strengthen composition and bring contemporary concert music to the public. Since the Fromm Music Foundation was founded by the late Paul Fromm in the 1950s, it has commissioned more than 300 new compositions and their performances, and sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series. 

Music Professor wins Korean-American Music competition

Professor David Evan Jones’s “Eemulnori: Memory and Reflection” for violin and piano was selected as one of six winning compositions in the Korean-American Music Composition Competition. The winning compositions will be used in upcoming performance competitions by young Korean students of classical music.
The goal of the competition is to disseminate Korean cultural heritage to younger generations growing up in the United States. Composers are invited to submit original pieces incorporating traditional Korean themes—written for Western musical instruments and suitable for student performers.
Jones is a composer of instrumental, vocal, and electronic music and a theorist writing about relationships between phonetics and music. His first chamber opera, “Bardos,” was staged in Seoul by the Seoul Contemporary Opera Company in 2004, and he is currently at work on his third opera.
Jones was recently invited to contribute to a festschrift for Korean composer Sung Jae Lee, a professor emeritus of Seoul National University. A festschrift is a complimentary publication, often symbolizing the results of research, which is created in honor of a person on the occasion of an anniversary celebration. In honor of Lee's 80th birthday, Jones composed a musical composition in the shape of the characters of Lee’s name.

Klevan to present workshop at Hawaii Music Education Conference

Lecturer Rob Klevan will present a workshop on developing school community jazz education programs at the Hawaii Music Education Conference, which will be held in Honolulu in January. The 23-piece UCSC Big Band, directed by Klevan, also has been invited to perform at the conference. Klevan’s article about establishing jazz education programs was published in the latest edition of the “Jazz Educators Association Journal.” He also serves as the Jazz Education Director for the Monterey Jazz Festival.
In addition, the UCSC Wind Ensemble, also directed by Klevan, will perform the National Anthem at the San Francisco Giants vs. Atlanta Braves baseball game on April 8 during opening weekend. This will be the 75-piece ensemble’s second such performance at a Giants game.

Theater Arts

Martinez awarded Fulbright grant

Assistant Theater Arts Professor Alma Martinez has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to conduct research and lecture at La Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru in Lima during the 2006-2007 academic year. Martinez will work with Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, one of the oldest and most important popular theater companies in Latin America. She also will lecture on the subject of the interconnectivity of Teatro Chicano in the United States and the New Popular Theatre (Nuevo Teatro Popular) in Latin America.
Martinez is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad to some 140 countries during 2006-2007 through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program aims to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.
In other news, Martinez performed in a reading of “Anna in the Tropics,” Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, that aired on National Public Radio from September to November 2005. Recorded for commercial distribution by LA Theatre Works, the performance also featured Jimmy Smits of “West Wing” and Herbert Siguenza of “Culture Clash.”
Earlier in 2005, Martinez performed in the play "Electricidad," written by MacArthur Award-winner Luis Alfaro and directed by Lisa Peterson, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, lectured on Chicano and Latin American Theatre at the Smithsonian Institute’s Graduate Seminar in Washington, D.C., participated in a workshop of Frank Loesser's last unproduced musical "Senor Discretion" at the Pasadena Playhouse, and lectured on Latino images in theater and film at Bucknell College in Pennsylvania.

Greensboro was recent stop for Southeast Asian mask exhibit

Kathy Foley's exhibit of Southeast Asian Masks, "Gods and Demons, Monkeys and Men," showed at the Guilford Art Gallery in Greesboro, North Carolina, through this month. Previous installations include East-West Center Gallery in Honolulu and the Northern Illinois Museum of Anthropology. It will open at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta in July. While the exhibit was at Northern Illinois University, Foley, a Theater Arts professor, served as the keynote speaker at the Second International Ramayana Conference.
This month Foley will be a guest lecturer for the Cultural Management Program at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Foley also is Editor of “Asian Theatre Journal.” Recent publications include “Shusin Kaniri, an Okinawan Kumiodori.” and collaborations with I Nyoman Sedana, a former UCSC student who is now director of Research at the Institute of Indonesian Arts in Denpasar, Bali.
National Geographic TV recently aired an episode on trance dance for their "Taboo" program,  which included interviews with Foley on horse trance performances in Java.  The series included Nepali, Javanese, and American religious phenomena.  Foley was a consultant on the project.

Jannarone works as actor, dramaturg in ancient Greek tragicomedy

Kimberley Jannarone, assistant professor of Theater Arts, worked as both an actor and a dramaturg in Ted Hughes's version of Alcestis, an ancient Greek tragicomedy by Euripides that tells the tale of a woman who takes her husband's place when death comes for him. The production was co-produced by Theater Emory, a professional theater company associated with Emory University in Georgia, and Out of Hand Theater, a troupe that American Theater magazine included in its recent article titled "Hot, Hip and on the Verge: A Dozen Young American Companies You Need to Know."
Jannarone was in residence at Emory this fall as part of a faculty exchange program with the Emory Classics Department.

Digital Arts and New Media

DANM manager publishes book

Moving Parts Press has published “COSMOGONIE INTIME,” a limited-edition, bilingual collaborative book of art featuring French poet Yves Peyré, visual artist Ray Rice, translator Elizabeth R. Jackson, and award-winning book artist Felicia Rice, who founded Moving Parts Press in 1977. A special exhibit titled “New Work from Moving Parts Press: COSMOGONIE INTIME" ran through December 8 at McHenry Library.
A painter, mosaicist, and animator of experimental films, Ray Rice died in 2001 at the age of 85. His animated art films are part of UCSC’s Special Collections archive. Rice contributed 17 pen-and-ink drawings as well as hand-painted the bastard title, or half-title, in all 96 copies of the book. Twelve deluxe copies were completely hand-painted by Rice, whom renowned French contemporary poet Peyré personally selected to contribute the visual art for the five intimate, universal poems that form the collection.
Book artist, publisher, and educator Felicia Rice has been a letterpress printer in Santa Cruz since 1973. Her books are housed in collections that range from the Whitney Museum in New York to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is the program manager of the Digital Arts and New Media department.

Performances

Recent events feature UCSC faculty, alumni

Theater Arts Professor Kathy Foley and Music Lecturer Undang Sumarna  led a performance titled "Gathering of Gamelan" at San Francisco's Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason. The troupe of musicians included Amy Beal, associate professor of music, and UCSC alumnus Henry Spiller (Oakes College, Music, 1978), an assistant professor of music at UC-Davis.
In March 2006, Foley and Sumarna will collaborate with Seattle-based gamelan artists at the Northwest Puppetry Center and at the University of Washington.  Former theater arts dance student Tikka Sears (Merrill College, Theater Arts), who coordinates Southeast Asian Studies outreach programs at the University of Washington, will dance as Sumarna and Foley present a puppet adaptation of the "Ghostly Goddess and the Sinner Saint: How Islam came to Java." Foley and Sumarna produced the story at UCSC in a student dance drama version in March 2005.
In another recent performance, Foley and Theater Arts Assistant Professor Patty Gallagher joined Avanthi Meduri, senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton, for an English performance tour of their joint project "Shattering the Silence: Blavatsky, Besant, Rukmini Devi" which was developed at UCSC. Performances were given at the University of Roehampton's Dance Series, Royal Holloway University in Surrey, and the University of Bristol's Performance Practice Project. Additionally, Mythili Kumar, Theater Arts lecturer, presented a concert of Bharata Natyam on the theme of friendship at the Mexican Cultural Center in San Jose on November 19 and 20.  The performance featured episodes spanning the great Indian epics and exposing ideas on friendship. The program combined artists from Kumar’s Abhinaya troupe with the Shakti  troupe of Southern California in an offering showcasing the beauty of Indian classical dance.