One of the things that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me is how we can reduce our carbon footprint through new ways of working, teaching, and learning. This was first brought home to me when the University shut down on March 18, 2020 and stopped trash and recycling collection. As I began transporting recycling from office to home, I realized that our dependence on paper was hindering our ability to share our arts with an audience beyond Greensboro. Two years later, the changes in freeing the College from this dependence are readily apparent.
The implementation of BoxCast in combination with a Zoom webinar license has enabled us to hold virtual concerts, productions, and events, including virtual masterclasses and talkbacks with luminaries in art, dance, music, and theatre. Through our ticketing system, ETix, audience members receive tickets to events electronically instead of picking up paper tickets at the Box Office. We have largely stopped printing programs, and QR codes direct audience members to access dance, music, and theatre programs on their smart devices.
Using Google application forms, faculty, staff, and students can apply to all of CVPA’s grant programs: the Dean’s Research and Creative Incentive Fund; Staff Development Fund; and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Access Fund. This spring we distributed over $20,000 in grants, all electronically. Whereas faculty used to submit large binders of documents for reappointment, promotion, and tenure, a university faculty activity reporting system has created a central data source for electronic submission and review.
Our students and faculty are finding additional ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Costume Technology Lecturer Tara Webb leads workshops in how to dye fabric using kitchen scraps and native plants rather than with chemical dyes. Director of Advising and Student Success Jennifer Reich produces an electronic student newsletter, “Weekly Happenings Around CVPA,” which saves on posters and flyers. And School of Art sculpture students are charting new ways of “upcycling” or transforming broken or unused objects into works of art.
Both the Princeton Review and Sierra Club Cool Schools have recognized UNC Greensboro as one of the most environmentally friendly universities in the United States. CVPA is doing its part by finding new ways to reduce our carbon footprint in the creation, performance, and dissemination of the visual and performing arts. The pandemic has not only accelerated our exploration of teleworking, streaming on demand, and electronic tickets and programs but also strengthened our commitment to sustainability in the arts.
Sincerely,
bruce d. mcclung, Dean
College of Visual and Performing Arts
|
|
A GROWING ART FORM — PAINTING WITH BACTERIA |
|
Karen Ingram (’96 Studio Art, Concentration in Painting) shines ultraviolet light on a petri dish to reveal an owl made by painting with bacteria. Photo provided by Terri Relos. |
|
Peanut butter and jelly…spaghetti and meatballs…painting and bacteria. Wait, what?
It may sound like the most impossible combination, but it’s just the kind of art + science mashup that Karen Ingram (’96 BFA Studio Art, Concentration in Painting) loves to explore:
“I think there’s a real overlap, and I think that the more conscious we are as artists about that overlap, the more we can work with things like bacteria as a material. Art and Science are closer than you think. I’m interested in the idea of using bacteria as a medium but also conceptually what that means for the future of technology and biotechnology.”
|
|
POLLINATOR GARDEN TAKES ROOT |
|
|
|
Site of the Pollinator Garden, a project developed by Leah Sobsey (Assistant Professor of Photography) and Tara Webb (Lecturer in Costume Technology).
Photos provided by Tara Webb.
|
|
A project promoting sustainability in the arts is sprouting on campus—both literally and figuratively—thanks to the passion and initiative of two CVPA faculty members. Leah Sobsey (Assistant Professor of Photography) and Tara Webb (Lecturer in Costume Technology) are creating a pollinator garden, which will soon be planted on a plot of land near UNCG’s outdoor basketball courts.
Sobsey had been toying with the idea of a garden artspace and a practice that would integrate plants and photography. Webb had been awarded the Office of Sustainability’s faculty fellowship and was working on a project to develop dyes from native plants to be used in preparing fabrics for theatrical costumes. They realized their research and personal interests overlapped and could bear greater fruit when combined.
They hope the garden will be a place where students and faculty can participate in supporting the ecosystem and highlight the importance of sustainable practices in several arenas. According to Webb:
“We have to do this. There’s a huge climate crisis that is happening, and we need to do anything we can to create dialogue in spaces anywhere about the reality of it.”
|
|
Megan Gottfried (’20 BFA Studio Art) has an exhibition at the Woskob Family Gallery in State College, Pennsylvania. The exhibition is titled Room to Room. See photos from the exhibition here.
Thomas Linger (’16 BM Miles Davis Jazz Studies) is one of five finalists for the prestigious Cole Porter Fellowship, given every four years by the American Pianists Association to an American jazz pianist. Finalists were selected in a blind audition process from nominations solicited from over 1,200 piano educators, jazz artists, agents, promoters, critics, record labels executives, and other industry professionals. Read more here.
Kelsey Paquin (’15 MM Clarinet Performance) has been named Assistant Professor of Clarinet at the University of North Alabama in Florence. Paquin was previously an Adjunct Professor of Clarinet at Troy University. She has stayed invested in UNCG’s Clarinet Studio, serving as a guest instructor in 2018 and a featured guest artist at the 2021 UNCG Digital Clarinet Day.
Michelle Lanteri (’13 BA Art History and Museum Studies, ’02 Media Studies) has received her PhD in Native American Art History from the University of Oklahoma with a dissertation titled “Patterns of Renewal: Native Women Artists and the Northern New Mexico Exhibitionary Complex in the Twenty-First Century.” Lanteri serves as the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico.
Koeun Grace Lee (’12 DMA Piano Performance and PMC Music Theory Pedagogy) recently performed the premiere of Variations on a Theme by Stefan Wolpe, a 52-minute solo piano work by American composer Robert Gross. Lee will also record the work this summer for Parma Records, along with works by David Burge and Jean Ahn. Listen to the performance here.
Brendan Slocumb (’94 BM Music Education) is author of The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor Books, 2022), which has been selected as a Good Morning America Book Club pick. The novel is Slocumb’s first and was reviewed recently in the New York Times. Read the review here.
|
|
Alumni News & Notes are compiled from self-submissions
and from the University’s news clip service.
|
|
Jazz Alumni Event
McGee’s Pub, New York | April 19 @ 9:30 PM
following the Jack Rudin Jazz Showcase featuring UNCG’s Jazz Ensemble I
School of Dance Alumni Celebration & Dedication of Jan Van Dyke Courtyard
Coleman Building, UNCG Campus | April 23 @ 4:00 PM
School of Theatre Centennial Kickoff
Taylor Theatre, UNCG Campus | April 23 @ 4:30 PM
(following the matinee performance of The SpongeBob Musical)
CVPA Alumni Happy Hour
McGee’s Pub, New York | May 7 @ 5:00 PM
|
|
FACULTY/STAFF NEWS & NOTES
Rachel Briley (Professor of Theatre for Young Audiences) has been awarded a Research Assignment for her continued research in Chile with the Teatro Lambe-Lambe Puppetry Group this fall.
Carole Ott Coelho (Professor of Conducting for Choral Music) has received Scholars’ Travel Funding to make her presentation “O Blissful Loss of Self: Explorations of Ecstasy in the Music and Poetry of Women” with Anima Vox duo (with Tadeu Coelho) at the Feminist Theory and Music 16 conference at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The Anima Vox duo performance will include filmed dance performed by Dylan Reddish, and aims to reclaim and to celebrate the vibrance and expansiveness of women’s ecstatic experiences in poetry and music.
Andy Hudson (Assistant Professor of Clarinet) joined Miami’s dazzling Nu Deco Ensemble for a performance on March 12th with singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham.
Quinton Parker (Assistant Professor of Music Education), Nicole Scalissi (Assistant Professor of Art History), and Clarice Young (Assistant Professor of Dance) have received funding from the Office of the Provost to attend the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) 2022 Faculty Success Program, a 12-week online program designed to develop skills to enhance research and writing productivity, as well as to develop strategies for work-life balance. Parker, Scalissi, and Young were among only eleven faculty members selected from across campus.
Quinton Parker (Assistant Professor of Music Education) will present the findings from his recent research study at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Narrative Inquiry in Music Education in Bergen, Norway in June 2022. Parker’s session, “We Wear the Mask,” presents the findings from his phenomenological examination into the lived experiences of Black undergraduate music education students in predominantly White schools of music. His methodology draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness and Critical Race Theory.
Jennifer Reis (Assistant Professor of Arts Administration) has been selected to teach at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee this summer. Her artistic practice in hand-stitched textiles has been honored with numerous awards, including Kentucky’s Al Smith Fellowship, national adjudicated and invitational exhibitions, and teaching opportunities at art and craft institutions including John C. Campbell Folk School, Cleveland Art Institute, Craft Alliance Center of Art + Design, Society of Contemporary Craft, and the Southwest School of Art.
Nicole F. Scalissi (Assistant Professor of Art History) gave an invited talk at East Tennessee State University on March 31st titled “‘the most disturbing, horrifying artwork I have ever seen’: Affect, Reality, and Violence in American Contemporary Art.”
Erin Speer (Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre, Directing, Acting) is the recipient of the
James Y. Joyner Award for Teaching Excellence 2022. The award recognizes outstanding teaching (online or blended instruction, and mentorship) at UNC Greensboro.
Faculty/Staff News & Notes are compiled from self-submissions
and from the University’s news clip service.
|
|
VISITING ARTIST IN SOCIAL PRACTICE |
|
Pablo Helguera, a pioneer of socially engaged artistic practice, is working with CVPA students this semester on a project that focuses on the reimagining of social conventions. The project will result in a publication that Helguera describes as “a manual to learn and perform new forms of cultural behavior.”
Helguera will visit the campus on April 7th and 8th to meet with students in person and to present a public artist talk. The talk will be on April 7th at 5:30 pm in the Weatherspoon Art Museum Auditorium followed by a cookout in the Sculpture Foundry Yard.
This artist visit is made possible by the Victoria and Ron Milstein Fund for Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice. The fund provides support to bring an eminent artist within social practice to campus each year for a multi-day residency to provide public lectures, interactive workshops in the classroom, and an exhibition on campus or at Greensboro Project Space created in collaboration with students in the Interdisciplinary and Social Practice Minor. The fund also includes selected scholarships for students within the Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice minor. Read more here.
|
|
SPECIAL PREVIEW PERFORMANCE |
|
UNCG’s Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program, recognized as one of the top ten programs in the country by Jazz Legend Wynton Marsalis, has been offered the prestigious invitation to compete in the Jack Rudin Jazz Championship in New York City.
Join us to Celebrate this Honor with a
One-Night Only Greensboro Preview Performance:
Thursday, April 14, 2022 @ 7:30 PM | Virginia Somerville Sutton Theatre @ Well•Spring
|
|
UNC GREENSBORO CONCERT AND LECTURE SERIES |
|
The 2021–2022 UCLS season concludes with Metropolitan Museum of Art Associate Curator Denise Murrell and Cuban dance company Malpaso, known as one of the most exciting contemporary dance companies touring today. |
|
Season Subscriptions are also on sale now for the 2022–2023 season, which includes Winston Duke, star of the blockbuster Marvel Studios movie Black Panther; violinist Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated musicians of our time; Urban Bush Women, a dance company whose works weave contemporary dance, music, and text with history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora; The Indigo Girls, a folk-rock duo that has been the voice of a generation since its beginnings in Atlanta and which will be accompanied by the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra; and Seraph Brass, a dynamic ensemble drawing from a roster of America’s top female brass players. The series also includes a free artist talk with Shaun Leonardo.
|
|
CLOSING SPOTLIGHT ON OUR DONORS
Thanks to you, UNCG raised $1,000,000+ to support student success and to build academic excellence during our annual giving campaign “Believe in the G.” Didn’t get a chance to participate? Don’t worry, it’s not too late to Light the Way with your gift of any size to any part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
|
|
The College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) e-Newsletter is published eight times a year in September, October, November, December, February, March, April, and May.
The Newsletter is emailed to CVPA alumni, faculty, staff, students, patrons, and donors. Please feel free to forward your copy, and anyone who would like their name to be added to our distribution list can contact us via uncgarts@uncg.edu.
The e-Newsletter is edited by Terri Relos, Director of External Relations. Archived issues can be found in the “News” section of the CVPA website. To submit Alumni News & Notes, please use this form. For Faculty/Staff News & Notes, use this form.
|
|
100 McIver St, Greensboro, NC 27412-5010
Tel: 336-334-5789
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
