2005 HIGHLIGHTS
2005 HighlightsHere are a few of the stories making the news this past year.
Alumnus and former Hopwood winner Arthur Miller died in his Connecticut home February 11, 2005, at the age of 89. He left behind a legacy of classic American theater works, including Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge.
“For me [the U-M] was very welcoming, and I found it a very good environment for mixing with a lot of people I normally wouldn’t have met,” he wrote 15 years after graduation. “It was my idea of what a university should be. It was…the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs, and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.”
Plans for the new 250-seat Arthur Miller Theatre were approved in March by the Regents. Miller had reviewed the plans earlier with former Music School Dean Karen Wolff.
The theater will be located within the new Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Drama Center, which will bring together offices and academic space from the departments of Theatre & Drama and Musical Theatre into facilities specifically designed for the dramatic arts.
In November, a Manhattan celebration of Arthur Miller’s career included showing proposed architectural renderings for the new theater. Alum and former Regent Robert Nederlander and his wife, Gladys, hosted the event with alum and Tony Award-winning Broadway producer Jeffrey Sellars. Graduates and faculty members of U-M’s School of Music brought Broadway, opera, dance, jazz, and classical violin to “Michigan on Broadway: A Tribute to Arthur Miller.*#8221;
The Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation donated $1.5 million to the University of Michigan and its School of Music toward construction of the Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Drama Center on U-M’s North Campus. The facility will house the 250-seat Arthur Miller Theatre and provide the school with modern rehearsal rooms, faculty offices, classrooms and specialized studios.
The U-M honored the late Arthur Miller and alumnus Charles R. Walgreen, Jr., at a naming ceremony for the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Drama Center and the Arthur Miller Theatre, currently under construction.
The ceremony included musical performances by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, who performed “New York Lights” from his score to the operatic adaptation of Miller’s A View from the Bridge. The aria was sung by George Shirley, the Joseph Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Professor of Music. Special guests included Miller’s sister, the actress Joan Copeland, and his son, the producer Robert Miller.
A U-M Creative Writing Program graduate’s first novel debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. Elizabeth Kostova’s (MFA ’04) novel, The Historian, tells the “backstory” of Dracula. She worked on the book for ten years, completing it during her years at U-M.
“It’s a remarkable achievement,” said, Peter Ho Davies, the Helen Zell Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program, “and unprecedented—to my knowledge—for a first book in its initial week of release to go straight to No. 1.”
Mississippi native Jesmyn Ward won three 2005 Hopwood awards totalling $16,900 including top honors in the Drama, Novel, and Graduate Essay categories as well as two other Hopwood-administered prizes: the John Wagner Prize and the Geoffrey James Gosling Prize. She was one of 34 winners of the 2005 Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Awards Ceremony who shared more than $114,500 in prizes.
Ward said she chose Michigan’s nationally acclaimed writing program because of the collegial way it brings together top writers as students and faculty, all helping each other get better. “You get time to concentrate on your work and don’t feel you have to compete with other people.”
Best-selling novelist and U-M graduate Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, was this year’s Hopwood lecturer. Orlean told winners writing is exhilarating and fascinating “but can be terribly lonely because the big conversation of writing finally comes down to just a very quiet moment alone….Then the next story follows and the journey begins again. What we write is what’s left behind.”
U-M graduate Aaron Dworkin is among 25 new MacArthur Fellows announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dworkin will receive $500,000 over the next five years in what the foundation describes as support with no strings attached.
Dworkin, 35, is founder and president of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which strives to increase the number of African-Americans and Latinos having careers in classical music. His efforts seek to counter young people’s perception that classical music careers face insurmountable barriers by providing them with rigorous training, affordable instruments and performance opportunities.
Columnist Katha Pollitt discussed sexism in the media in an April lecture entitled “Women? What Women? Sexism in the Media, Chapter 5361.”
Pollitt’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Ms., and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Michigan Media Award, an honor given annually to journalists who cover issues pertaining to women and gender.
The Annual Copernicus Lecture featured renowned Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, winner of the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Nobel prize-winning author Czeslaw Milosz wrote of Zagajewski that he took “the lead in the poetry of my language, a living proof that Polish literature is energy incessantly renewed against all probabilities.”
Film director David Lynch spoke on the creative process in filmmaking and how his 30-year practice of Transcendental Meditation has fostered his creativity and innovation. Lynch is the director of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and the cult classic Eraserhead, among other movies, and created the iconic TV series “Twin Peaks.”
When parallel paths happen to cross, innovation results. And so it was for U-M professors Michael Gould of the School of Music and Vincent Castagnacci from Art + Design, who created a new genre they call a "visual/acoustic collaborative installation."
“Into the Quarry: a Parallel Convergence” utilized the creative techniques and physical movements of the painter as an auditory theme, adding the integration of digital audio technology and surround sound. The exhibit was on display in the fall at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus.
Christopher Kendall, an award-winning conductor and accomplished musician, became the new dean of the U-M School of Music in August.
Kendall, who plays the lute, served as associate conductor of the Seattle Symphony from 1987–1993 and was director of the Music Division and Tanglewood Institute of the Boston University School of the Arts. Since 1975 he has been the conductor and artistic director of the 20th Century Consort, ensemble-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution; and since 1978 founder and lutenist of the Folger Consort, early music ensemble-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
U-M and Peking University will create a Joint Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences, which will support research and training in both quantitative social sciences and Chinese Studies. Joint seminars in Beijing will bring together U-M and Chinese students and faculty. The location of the program in Beijing will give U.S. students access to Chinese scholars, libraries, and museums, and immersion in Chinese culture.
The agreement was finalized during a visit to China by U-M president Mary Sue Coleman and then-provost Paul Courant.
U-M’s Prison Creative Arts Project celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, bringing self-expression to Michigan prisoners. The program trains U-M students to manage workshops in juvenile and prison facilities in the areas of art, creative writing, theater, dance, music, photography, and video.
Engineering and art came together for U-M student Evan Quasney, who used computer modeling to help set new guidelines for how the Smithsonian stores art—and who believes he knows why the Mona Lisa keeps deteriorating despite its controlled environment. Quasney’s model showed that applying a layer of gesso to the reserve of panel paintings reduces their tendency to warp with changes in humidity, and avoid developing significant stresses that cause cracking.
Research scientist Marion Mecklenburg, of the Smithsonian, led Quasney’s research group and believes such computer modeling will change the way art is preserved in the future.
The St. Petersburg String Quartet was in residence at the School of Music during the 2004–05 academic year. In addition to working with student composers, the renowned group presented a concert performing works by School of Music faculty Bright Sheng, Evan Chambers, and Susan Botti.
Ann Arbor businessman and philanthropist Helmut F. Stern has given his collection of African art to the U-M Museum of Art. The 90-piece collection--regarded by experts as among the most significant of Central African material--is noted for its outstanding objects from many cultures, with a primary focus on the Congo.
Over the years, Stern has given numerous financial gifts and works of art to UMMA. Previous gifts include a significant collection of Japanese paintings, masterworks by Swiss artist Paul Klee and English master J.M.W. Turner, and several individual African works.
The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter has announced that the design for the expansion and renovation of the U-M Museum of Art has won a coveted design award in the Project category, one of only four awarded worldwide in this category.
The $35 million UMMA project includes a 53,000-square-foot addition with new galleries, and substantial restoration and renovation to its current facility.
The opening of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the Special Collections Library in April was celebrated with a festive kosher reception with hors d’oeuvres and klezmer music.
The exhibition highlights gifts from Constance Harris to the University Library and the Frankel Center and features exquisite ritual objects, works of art, illustrated books, and the materials of everyday life spanning several centuries from communities around the globe.
Art students in a class taught by School of Art & Design assistant professor Satoru Takahashi exhibited their creation at the Work Gallery in Ann Arbor in May, in a show called “Art of Wonder, Devices of Memory.” The students worked with participants in the Coffeehouse program, a support group that serves seniors in the early stages of memory loss, at the Turner Center, to create life stories and “memory devices.”
The Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) has been awarded another grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), this time for $370,000 to support the organization’s work during the next two years, bringing the NEH’s decade of support for APIS to more than $1.6 million.
There are 13 APIS partners in the U.S. and 15 in Europe, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
William Bolcom’s epic “Songs of Innocence and Experience” was nominated for four Grammy Awards, including Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance. The recording was also nominated for Best Classical Contemporary Composition and Best Produced Album, Classical.
The performance, in collaboration with the School of Music and University Musical Society, was conducted by Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London.
The University Musical Society announced that the Royal Shakespeare Company is returning to campus for a three-week residency in October and November 2006, featuring performances of Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest, with film and TV star Patrick Stewart in leading roles.
Ann Arbor will be the sole venue for the three plays, which are part of the RSC’s recently announced Complete Works Festival, which begins in April 2006.
Researchers from the schools of Art & Design, Education, Information, LSA, and the Residential College are using the children’s book collection at the Special Collections Library to explore a variety of topics.
The materials are being used to study changes in illustrations over the decades, how children and minority groups have been represented over the years in both text and illustration, the history of publishing, the collaboration of authors and illustrators, character development, the portrayal of historic events such as the space programs of the 1950s or the emergence of television in everyday life and the study of childhood itself.
