Cultural Events and Performances
Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun: Reframing Abstract Expressionism
Now – December 15
Katzen Museum
Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun were both remarkable painters of the second Abstract-Expressionist generation who lived and worked as influential artists and teachers in the Baltimore/Washington region for many decades. Although they began their careers as gestural abstractionists in the mold of Pollock and de Kooning, both went on to reinvent and revitalize the signature styles of the Ab-Ex movement in powerful and personal ways. They were enabled to do so in large part by their self-selected, “outside-of-New York” locale, which permitted each of these very different artists to develop her own dialogue with painting, away from the shifting fashions and pressures of the commercial mainstream. This show brings together more than two dozen large-scale and rarely seen works by Hartigan and Herzbrun from private and public collections, many in the Baltimore/Washington area. It redirects attention to the local contexts and communities in which these works were produced and deepens understanding of the relationship between mainstream modernist movements such as Ab-Ex and their rich regional transformations.
Topographies of Life: Pam Rogers, Lynn Sures, Mel Watkin
Now – December 15
Katzen Museum
Using the medium of drawing to varied and distinctive effect, Rogers, Sures, and Watkin trace human connections to the natural world – across time and varied landscapes. From depictions of the deserts of Kenya, forests of the Midwest, to the Potomac watershed, these artists are deeply attuned to the mutually affecting relationship between the anthropological and natural worlds.
Moves Like Walter: New Curators Open the Corcoran Legacy Collection
Now – December 15
Katzen Museum
This collection is a product of Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen’s spring course on curatorial practice. Graduate students in art history, arts management, and studio art curated a playful and provocative interpretation of the 9,000-piece gift from the Corcoran. The exhibition is inspired by Walter Hopps, briefly the Director of the Corcoran and an erratic but seminal American curator of contemporary art. The curators have divided their responses into five sub-groups, Boundless: Existing Within Ambiguous Space, The Road Home, The Selfless Spirit: Nature vs. Nurture and the Effects of Motherhood in the Corcoran Collection, American Legacy: Reconsidering Non-Western Subjects in the Corcoran Collection, and Redefining the Gaze: Shifting the Power.
Yoga in the Galleries
November 6, 13, 20, 27, 10 – 11 a.m.American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Led by certified Kripalu Yoga teacher Eva Blutinger, this yoga class provides mental clarity and relaxation in the peaceful surroundings of our art galleries. Please bring a mat. Cost is $10 for non-members, $5 for museum members, and free for members at the Associates level and above. www.tinyurl.com/aumtickets.
CHOREOLAB: A Concert of Works in Proces
November 8, 9, 8 – 10 p.m.
Greenberg Theatre
An annual workshop for emerging student choreographers who approach their work as though in a laboratory: experimenting, upending assumptions, and valuing process as highly as results. Post-show conversation with choreographers and cast. RSVP:
https://auartstix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1417&r=e645bbe7e93340c1b85103bfb0d78a3b
Gallery Talk: fair is foul & foul is fair
November 9, 5 – 6 p.m.
Katzen Museum
Explore themes of foulness and fairness in this gallery talk focused on works by collaborating Irish artists Aideen Barry and Alice Maher. Featuring a vocal performance by Ceara Conway of a poem specially created for this exhibition. Free and open to all, RSVP:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gallery-talk-fair-is-foul-foul-is-fair-tickets-73334169475
Late Fall Opening Reception
November 9, 6 – 9 p.m.
Katzen Museum
Mix and mingle with artists, curators, and fellow patrons and preview five new exhibitions. Free and open to all, no RSVP required.
Radical Link
November 9 – December 15
Katzen Museum
The latest project by Tel Aviv-based multi-media artist Michal Heiman traverses time, space, gender, race, and institutional practices of asylum, as Heiman offers a new way to extend solidarity to those who engage in acts of resistance by creating a new community. It includes women who have been subjugated by the Surrey County Asylum in London and the San Servolo Asylum in Venice, asylum seekers, artists, activists, prosecutors, gatekeepers, and those who have suffered under the violence of racism and misogyny. Through the strategies of intervention and the use of archival materials, photographs, films, sound work, and her presence in the gallery, she generates the political, cultural, gendered, and psychic conditions of a potential “radical link.”
Christine Neill: Observations from the Valley Floor
November 9 – December 15
Katzen Museum
Christine Neill is a nationally celebrated American artist whose work blends motifs of biological examination with visual processes and techniques. She has exhibited widely while influencing thousands of students throughout her long tenure as professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The effects of environmental changes on human life and the reaction of the earth’s habitats to these threats underlie her investigations and images.
fair is four and foul is fair
November 9 – December 15
Katzen Museum
“Fair is foul and foul is fair” as claimed by the witches in Macbeth describes a world where nothing – no message, no deed – is ethically clear. In Shakespeare’s fair/foul world, evil walks abroad in the guise of good, and all expectations are confounded and confused. In this double exhibition by Alice Maher and Aideen Barry, tropes of what could be considered fair and foul morph into unrecognizable, interchangeable and above all, challenging artworks. Both artists engage at the fault lines of artmaking where sociocultural movements, media, imagery, and language overlap and collapse to animate new, personal ways of communicating this semiotic conundrum. Both also bring an individual, stinging humor and critique to their investigations of hybridity, carnality, and social politics in historical time. The focus of both artists on the interchangeabilities of fairness and foulness is played out in this exhibition with a fascinating and urgent energy.
ARCADIA: The Clyde’s Murals by William Woodward
November 9 – December 15
Katzen Museum
William Woodward’s vibrant, 72-foot mural, Arcadia (1980), evokes a landscape of pure painterly invention, a lost world that has inspired poets, artists, and musicians since antiquity.
These 11 impressive panels – with scenes influenced by artists from Poussin to N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle – depict magical forests, naked nymphs and frolicking fauns, satyrs, centaurs, and mystical seashores with mermaids, pirates, and treasure ships became a success de scandale when they were first unveiled at the now legendary Clyde’s Restaurant of Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.
Dark World: Photographs by Frank Hallam Day
November 9 – December 15
Katzen Museum
This exhibition, as its name implies, examines the distinctive quality of settings in various corners of the world as seen at night, and combines multiple bodies of the artist’s work spanning more than 12 years. Day, a DC-based fine art photographer, has worked all over the world, often at night, looking for and in some cases creating a nocturnal mise-en-scène. The images are mysterious, unsettling, and examine the uncertainties, ambiguities, and possibilities of photographs shot at night and with unusual and sometimes unexpected light sources. The exhibition features work from Bangkok, Berlin, New York, Florida, Myanmar, Cambodia, and elsewhere.
AU Symphonic Band: The Divine Comedy
November 10, 3 – 4:30 p.m.
Abramson Family Recital Hall
The ensemble tackles Robert W. Smith’s devilishly difficult Symphony no. 1 for Band (The Divine Comedy), each movement depicting a portion of Dante’s literary masterpiece. RSVP: https://auartstix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1412&r=ccfe73053f56479f8fb07691bd551bca
AU Improv Show
November 15, 6 – 8:30 p.m.
The Wechsler Theater
For the second show of the semester, the performers will take suggestions from the audience and improvise sketches based on what they are given. RSVP: http://aumissionimprov.com
AU Jazz Orchestra: Fall for Jazz
November 15, 7:30 – 9 p.m.
Abramson Family Recital Hall
From big band to funk-rock to Latin sounds, AU’s own jazz orchestra brings the swing. Conductor Josh Bayer is a guitarist, composer, and director who has performed at the Kennedy Center, The Detroit Opera House, and National Public Radio. RSVP:
https://auartstix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1413&r=f8687fc847ad413b98d0a0f46fe06ded
Gallery Talk: Dark World
November 16, 3 – 4 p.m.
Katzen Museum
Frank Hallam Day illuminates dark corners of the world in a discussion of his photographs on view in Dark World. Free and open to all, RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gallery-talk-dark-world-tickets-73262573329
AU Symphony Orchestra: Discovering Kalinnikov
November 16, 3 – 4:30 p.m., 7:30 – 9 p.m.
Abramson Family Recital Hall
A household name in Russia yet virtually unknown in the United States, Vasily Kalinnikov numbers among the great early twentieth-century composers. Hear his thrilling Symphony no. 1 alongside selections from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Jiaming Wu, winner of AU’s 2019 Concerto and Aria Competition, will play the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 12 in A Major. RSVP: http://ow.ly/zooH50w3ifk
JRA Distinguished Artist Series: Rebecca Hutchinson
November 17, 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Katzen Museum
Rebecca Hutchinson's complex paper clay pieces evoke the natural world. Using a range of surprising materials, she combines papermaking and ceramics to create artworks that surpass one medium alone. Groupings of huge hanging pods, forests of crocheted paper clay vines, and bunches of overgrown flowerlike forms that feel freshly gathered from a giant's field and hung to dry all celebrate the "complexity of engineering" and the inexorable force of survival in the natural world. Hutchinson is a Professor of Ceramics at UMass/Dartmouth. Presented in conjunction with the James Renwick Alliance’s Distinguished Artist Series, this lecture is free and open to the public. To register, Hutchinson’s accompanying workshop, click here.
Dance Capstone Performances
November 22, 6 – 7:30 p.m.
Katzen Museum
Graduating dance students present an evening of looping performances throughout the galleries of the AU Museum. Projects include provocative TED-style talks, new choreographies, demos, and powerful dancing. Discussion and reception follow. RSVP: https://auartstix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1403&r=f0a219dc01094280aa5456c41429dc41
AU Workshop Concert: Interchange
November 22, 7:30 – 9 p.m.; November 23, 6 – 7:30 p.m.
Abramson Family Recital Hall
AU's experimental jazz ensemble find common ground between wide-ranging musical traditions: jazz and classical, electric and acoustic, written and improvised, homegrown and global. RSVP:
https://auartstix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1414&r=bbb7980358914f279ada2977e3791725
AU Chorus: Carmina Burana
November 23, 7:30 – 9 p.m.; November 24, 3 – 4 p.m.
Abramson Family Recital Hall
One of the most recognizable and emotionally intense choral works of all time comes to life on stage. The first strains of the apocalyptic O Fortuna have riveted audiences in their seats for almost one hundred years. RSVP: http://ow.ly/dQj850wdGZ3