New Music at Willamette Hosts Free Spring Concert

New Music at Willamette presents a free spring concert featuring Beta Collide New Music Ensemble with guest artist Stephen Vitiello Saturday, April 5, at 7 p.m. in Hudson Hall at Willamette University.

Vitiello will host a guest lecture Thursday, April 3, from 2:45 to 3:45 p.m. in Rogers Rehearsal Room. Beta Collide will lead a student composer reading session Friday, April 4, from 2 to 3 p.m. in Rogers Rehearsal Room. Both events are free and open to the public.

Beta Collide is directed by Willamette Flute Instructor Molly Barth, who recently won a Grammy Award for work with her previous group eighth blackbird, and Brian McWhorter on trumpet. Other musicians are David Riley on piano and Phillip Patti on percussion. The music ensemble focuses on the collision of musical art forms, from new complexity to ambient, from low-brow to high-brow, from radically extended technique to site-specific improvisation, from popular to the academy.

Vitiello is an assistant professor of kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University and archivist for The Kitchen, a non-profit, interdisciplinary organization in New York that supports innovative artists. He is an electronic musician and sound artist who transforms incidental atmospheric noises into soundscapes that alter people’s perception of the surrounding environment. Vitiello has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations.

For more information, contact the Willamette Music Department at (503) 370-6255.

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Guitar Series Goes 'Beyond Six Strings'

The Grace Goudy Distinguished Artists Series will present a series of three guitar performances in April in Hudson Hall at Willamette University.

The series, "Beyond Six Strings," features some of the world's leading performers who are exploring the guitar in unique ways. The guitar is one of society's most popular instruments, yet its history and evolution often are overlooked and narrowly interpreted to only include six-string guitars. This series will include performances that explore significant trends in the instrument's development.

The series begins Friday, April 4, at 8 p.m. with Grammy Award nominee Paul Galbraith, who will perform on the eight-string Brahms guitar of his own invention, which is held upright like a cello. The program will include original transcriptions of works that typically have been considered unplayable on the guitar, by composers that include Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Lennox Berkeley and William Byrd.

The second concert in the series is Sunday, April 13, at 7 p.m. featuring Emmy Award nominee John Doan, associate professor of guitar at Willamette. Doan will perform original works on the 20-string harp guitar as well as forgotten works by Fernando Sor, father of the classical guitar, on a rare 1829 three-necked harpolyre.

The series concludes Friday, April 18, at 8 p.m. with Ronn McFarlane, considered one of the world's leading performers of the 13-course (18-string) lute. He will perform works by John Dowland and Francesco da Milano, as well as contemporary original pieces.

Tickets for each performance are $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors, with a series price for all three concerts of $40 for adults and $25 for students and seniors. They are available at the Pentacle Theatre Ticket Office in Salem at 145 Liberty St. NE, Suite 102, or they can be charged by phone at (503) 485-4300. Tickets are subject to a service charge. For more information, call the Willamette University Music Department at (503) 370-6255.

Staff and Students

Individual Prices:
$10 WU Faculty/Staff, $3 WU Students

Series Price:
$25 WU Faculty/Staff, $8 WU Students

The Willamette community may purchase tickets at the Music Department in the Rogers Music Center or charge by phone, x6255.

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Lecture Recognizes Collectors' Contributions to Chicago Museum

Suzanne Folds McCullagh, curator of earlier prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, will discuss three women art collectors in a free lecture Wednesday, April 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Cone Chapel at Willamette University.

The lecture, "Leading Ladies with an Eye: Three Generations of Drawing Collectors in Chicago," is part of Willamette's annual Hogue-Sponenburgh Art Lecture series. McCullagh will examine the unique visions and insights of three collectors who have helped shape the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the major works they have brought to the public.

During the past 50 years, these philanthropic women have assembled major collections of European drawings that are the envy of museums around the world. Helen Regenstein, who began to build her collection in 1958, enabled the museum to acquire 125 European drawings from the 16th-20th centuries. The collection of Dorothy Braude Edinburg of Boston led to a 2006 Art Institute exhibition of 166 works on paper, which she donated to the museum. This October, the museum's newly renovated print and drawing galleries will feature an exhibition of 126 Renaissance and Baroque Italian works collected during the past 40 years by Jean Goldman.

McCullagh has been a member of the curatorial staff at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1975, specializing in French and Italian Renaissance and Baroque prints and drawings. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogs, including a 1979 scholarly collection of more than 700 drawings, Italian Drawings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The annual Hogue-Sponenburgh art lectureship, established and endowed by the late Janeth Hogue-Sponenburgh and Mark Sponenburgh, enables the Willamette department of art and art history to bring a noted scholar, artist, critic, curator or art leader to campus to deliver a lecture and meet informally with students and faculty.

For more information, call (503) 370-6925.

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Prints Provide Views of 18th-century Rome

A small exhibition of prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th-century Italian etcher and archaeologist, opens March 22 and continues through May 18 at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University.

Organized by Ann Nicgorski, professor of art history at Willamette and faculty curator at the museum, Piranesi: Views of Rome will include a range of prints drawn from regional collections, including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Reed College, the Portland Art Museum and a private collector. The exhibition will include Piranesi’s “Arch of Titus” from the collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

From 1748–74, Piranesi (1720–78) created his famous “Views of Rome,” a series of prints that depicted the eternal city’s majestic ruins and served for generations as the standard representations of Roman grandeur.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Marnie Stark, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum, will give a free lecture Thursday, April 3, at 7 p.m. in the Roger Hull Lecture Hall at the museum. Stark will discuss Piranesi’s prints within the context of the Greco-Roman controversy in which French and German scholars dismissed Roman architecture and design as derivative and inferior to that of the Greeks.

Piranesi: Views of Rome is supported in part by grants from the City of Salem’s Transient Occupancy Tax and the Oregon Arts Commission.

The Hallie Ford Museum of Art is located at 700 State St. (corner of State and Cottage streets) in downtown Salem near the campus of Willamette University. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed Monday. Admission is $3 for adults and $2 for seniors and students. Children younger than 12 are admitted free, and Tuesday is an admission-free day. For more information, call (503) 370-6855 or visit www.willamette.edu/museum_of_art.

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Hallie Ford Museum of Art Wins Grant from Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian

The Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University received a $15,000 grant from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to publish a catalog on the work of multimedia artist Joe Feddersen, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes.

The National Museum of the American Indian announced 13 recipients Thursday for the inaugural Visual and Expressive Arts Grants program. This new program offers support to a wide range of arts activities with the goal of increasing knowledge, understanding and appreciation of contemporary Native American arts.

The grant will allow the Hallie Ford Museum, in partnership with the University of Washington Press and The Evergreen State College, to co-publish the exhibition catalog “Joe Feddersen: Vital Signs.” The exhibition is a retrospective of Feddersen’s best work in prints, glass and weaving since the mid–1990s. The book accompanies an exhibition organized by faculty curator and anthropology Associate Professor Rebecca Dobkins that will be on display at the Missoula Art Museum in Montana June 2–Sept. 20, at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington Sept. 12, 2009–Jan. 10, 2010, and at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art Jan. 30–March 28, 2010.

The “Joe Feddersen: Vital Signs” catalog will include a biographical essay by Dobkins, an introduction by artist Barbara Thomas and a critical essay by artist/writer Gail Tremblay. The book, available later this spring, will be a new volume in the prestigious Jacob Lawrence Series on American Art and Artists of the University of Washington Press. Feddersen’s work explores the interrelationships between urban place markers and indigenous design through powerful combinations of contemporary media and native iconography.

The Smithsonian grants were made in two funding areas, the visual arts and expressive arts. The Hallie Ford Museum received a visual arts grant, which supports exhibitions and installations of contemporary Native American art, as well as publications and critical writing.

Another visual arts grant given to the Art Association of Jackson Hole, Wyo., will support a traveling exhibition by Willamette alumna Marie Watt, a 1990 graduate who serves on Willamette’s Native American Advisory Council. Organized by the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyo., the traveling exhibition, “Marie Watt: Blanket Stories,” will allow the artist to lead gallery talks, present a slide lecture and organize a family sewing circle to encourage discussion about contemporary and historical Native American art, traditions and personal inspiration.

For more about the Visual and Expressive Arts Grants and a list of the other winners, go to www.nmai.si.edu/press/releases/20080314_Grant_Recipients.pdf.

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Willamette Master Chorus and Grammy Winner to Perform with Orchestra

Salem Chamber Orchestra (SCO) presents the third program of the Drs. William and Selma Moon Pierce Masterworks Series Saturday, March 15, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 16, at 3 p.m. in Hudson Hall at Willamette University.

The program features the Willamette Master Chorus and solo vocalists Misook Yun (soprano) and Kevin Helppie (baritone) performing Gabriel Fauré's ethereal Requiem in D minor, op. 48.

“I find that the Fauré is one of the most exquisite settings of the Latin Requiem text in western music,” says Willamette Master Chorus Director Paul Klemme, who will conduct the work. The ensemble will perform the 1893 version of the work, reconstructed by John Rutter.

Also on the program, SCO welcomes back founder and music director laureate Bruce McIntosh to conduct the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 297b. The work features four wind soloists: Molly Barth, flute; Mitch Iimori, oboe; Mike Curtis, bassoon; and Steve Hayworth, horn. Barth recently won a Grammy Award for a recording made as a member of the contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird. She moved to Oregon in 2006 and is a Willamette music instructor as well as the principal flutist with SCO.

Individual tickets are available through the Pentacle Theatre ticket office, 145 Liberty St. NE, Suite 102, Salem, or by calling (503) 485-4300. Prices are $10-$20 for adults and $5 for students. Seating is reserved.

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Artist, Professors Discuss Properties of Paint

In conjunction with its exhibition James Lavadour: The Properties of Paint, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art is hosting a free symposium Thursday, March 13, at 6:30 p.m. in Cone Chapel, on the second floor of Waller Hall at Willamette University.

The symposium will bring artists and scientists together to discuss the material and philosophical properties of paint and the interconnections between art, geology, the environment, physics and human creativity. Participants will include painter James Lavadour and Willamette University faculty members Andries Fourie (art), Scott Pike (environmental and earth science) and Rick Watkins (physics). Faculty curator Rebecca Dobkins (anthropology) will moderate.

James Lavadour: The Properties of Paint features a range of recent work by this nationally recognized Native American painter and printmaker. Since 2000, Lavadour has focused intensely on the properties of paint, creating works that he describes as “intersections” between his better-known landscapes and his lesser-known architectural structures. The exhibition runs through March 30.

Both the exhibition and symposium are supported by an endowment gift from The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, through the Spirit Mountain Community Fund. Additional support has been provided by grants from the City of Salem’s Transient Occupancy Tax funds and the Oregon Arts Commission.

The Hallie Ford Museum of Art is located at 700 State St. (corner of State and Cottage streets) in downtown Salem near the campus of Willamette University. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed Monday. Admission is $3 for adults and $2 for seniors and students. Children younger than 12 are admitted free, and Tuesday is an admission-free day. For more information, call (503) 370-6855.

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Climate Expert to Address Global Warming Science and Policy

Climate expert Stephen Schneider will deliver the 2008 Dempsey Lecture on Environmental Issues Monday, March 10, at 8 p.m. in Smith Auditorium at Willamette University.

Schneider’s topic is “Global Warming: Is the Science Settled Enough for Policy?” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Schneider, a professor of environmental biology and global change at Stanford University, has authored or co-authored more than 500 scientific papers, media articles, legislative testimonies and book chapters on climate change issues. A co-director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Schneider has served as a consultant to federal agencies and to the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

During the 1980s he emerged as a leading advocate of sharp reductions of greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. He was part of the team that provided climate change data in 2007 that resulted in the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

This lecture is sponsored by the Dempsey Foundation, the Willamette University Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences and the Center for Sustainable Communities. For more information, contact Andrea Carlson at (503) 370-6654.

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Piano Duo to Perform for Goudy Distinguished Artists Series

The Grace Goudy Distinguished Artists Series presents the Nyaho/Garcia Duo on piano Tuesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Hudson Hall at Willamette University.

The artists are Susanna Garcia, a South Texas native who has performed both solo and chamber recitals throughout North America and Europe, and William Chapman Nyaho, a Ghanaian-American who currently is visiting artist-in-residence at Willamette.

Garcia and Nyaho began their musical collaboration in the early 1990s while both were teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Praised for their energetic and compelling performances, the pianists bring their rich cultural backgrounds to their repertoire, exploring the music of African, Hispanic and women composers. The duo’s first CD of the complete transcriptions of the works of Aaron Copland for two pianos was lauded by Classical Magazine: “[They] form a perfect match in their style of playing, their tone and their genuine feeling and understanding of the Copland pieces.”

Garcia, coordinator of keyboard at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has toured Mexico giving recitals and workshops through the government’s Cultural Enrichment Program. Her work has appeared in the journals 19th Century Music, Interdisciplinary Humanities and Piano Pedagogy Forum.

Nyaho’s work has been lauded by The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Gramophone magazine and poet Maya Angelou. He is a faculty member of the Interlochen Summer Arts Camp in Michigan, and his five-volume anthology, “Piano Music by Composers of Africa and the Diaspora,” was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press.

Tickets are $20 for adults and $12 for students and seniors, and are available at the Pentacle Theatre Ticket Office in Salem at 145 Liberty St. NE, Suite 102. Tickets also can be charged by phone at (503) 485-4300, and are subject to a service charge. For more information, call the Willamette University Music Department at (503) 370-6255.

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Willamette Hosts Annual Powwow

Willamette University will host the Sixth Annual Social Powwow Saturday, March 8, in Cone Field House at Sparks Athletic Center. The free event, which is open to the public, begins with a Grand Entry at 4 p.m.

The event will include native arts and crafts, food, dancers and drum groups. Prizes will be awarded in a Fancy Shawl Dance contest, and there will be a raffle to win a Pendleton blanket and other prizes. The master of ceremonies is Bob Tom, arena director is David West and host drum is Four Directions.

This year’s powwow is in honor of Warm Springs tribal elder Warren “Rudy” Clements and his daughter Trudee Clements, both of whom passed away in recent years. Rudy Clements was the leader of economic development and longtime public face for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. For three decades, he lent his political and governmental awareness, leadership skills and unique speaking style to addressing the concerns of the Indian people living in western Oregon. His daughter, a drummer and singer, was a champion Fancy Shawl dancer.

The powwow is sponsored by Willamette’s Native American Enlightenment Association and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. For more information, call (503) 370-6265.

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Willamette Theatre Presents ‘The Women’

Willamette University Theatre announces its final show of the 2007–08 season, Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women.” The production runs March 7, 8 and 13–15 at 8 p.m., and March 9 and 16 at 2 p.m., with a preview performance March 6 at 8 p.m. Performances are in the Kresge Theatre at Willamette University.

“The Women” is a gleefully malicious comedy about New York socialites, their twisted marriages and the delicious gossip that ruins their reputations. Smart, sexy and scandalous, these femme fatales close Willamette’s 2007–08 season with style.

The play focuses on the lives of several Manhattan socialites in the 1930s, including Mary Haines, the sweet, faithful wife of Stephen. When Mary finds out that Stephen has been seeing a shop girl named Crystal, she is advised by her friends and family to ignore the infidelity. However, when news of Stephen’s affair is published, Mary decides against all recommendations to leave her husband. Two years later, Stephen has married Crystal, who proves to be a fickle wife. With the help of her friends, Mary attempts to expose Crystal and win back Stephen’s love.

The play examines several poignant subjects that are relevant today, including love, marriage, pride and friendship. Perhaps most pointedly, playwright Clare Boothe Luce reveals the lengths to which women will go to protect their families and their dignity.

“The Women” is directed by guest artist Karen Vaccaro, who has been a mainstay in Chicago theatre since 1982, working as a director and actress. She has won three Joseph Jefferson Awards for her work.

Technical elements of the production will provide a varied portrayal of 1930s settings. Scene designer and department co-chair Chris Harris will create the play’s visual surroundings, Bobby Brewer-Wallin will create the stylish 1930s wardrobe, and Willamette Theatre technical director Rachel Steck will serve as lighting designer. The cast features 19 young actresses from Willamette and the surrounding area.

To purchase tickets, contact the Willamette University Box Office at (503) 370-6221 or reserve tickets by email at thtr-tix@willamette.edu. Opening night is $12 for general admission and $8 for students and seniors. Most other evening performances are $10 for general admission and $6 for students and seniors. Contact the box office for specific pricing and details. For more information, call (503) 370-6222 or visit www.willamette.edu/cla/theatre.

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