November 26, 2018
ArtsUW Roundup: Opening Night of Fefu and Her Friends, Music of Displaced Peoples, Donna Haraway Film Screening, and more!
This week in the arts, attend María Irene Fornés’ most celebrated, realistic and feminist works, go to opening night of Clotilde Jiménez’s “Apple of My Eye”, learn about the restoration of the miraculous image of the Madonna del Baraccano, listen to a 100-voice gospel choir, and more.
Fefu and Her Friends
November 28 to December 9 | Meany Studio Theater
Professor Valerie Curtis-Newton directs an all-female cast in María Irene Fornés’ most celebrated, realistic and feminist works, Fefu and Her Friends. Fefu turns the “ladies who lunch” trope on its head, bringing together an extraordinary—and regular—group of women who, over the course of a weekend in the country, peel away at each other’s layers, uncovering both the horrors and felicities of contemporary womanhood. Fornés said that Fefu’s realism evolved from the fact that she could feel the characters standing around her, that “one can feel the characters breathe.”
Fornés, who passed away October 31st at the age of 88, has been called “the most important American playwright you’ve never heard of,” and “influential beyond measure.” She is considered by many to be the mother of U.S. Latinx Theatre. This year marks a national celebration of her work, Celebrando Fornés/Celebrating Fornés.
$10 tickets for UW students | More Info
Clotilde Jiménez: Apple of My Eye
Opening Reception, November 29, 5:00 to 8:00 pm / Exhibition on display through December 29 | Jacob Lawrence Gallery
This exhibition shares work by UK-based artist Clotilde Jiménez. It features Jiménez’s recent collages and charcoal drawings that use fruit, a traditional symbol alluding to sexuality in Western art history, to explore the constraints of sexual identity in Western culture. Using everyday and texturally rich materials such as wallpaper, images cut from magazines, and plastic bags, the collages bring pointed humor and formal rigor to the representation of the Black, queer, masculine body.
As an artist, Jiménez was inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s use of form and color to tell stories, “Jacob Lawrence was one of the few artists who showed me that it was not only possible to depict my life as a Black person in my own way but that it was also important and needed. Jacob Lawrence’s forms and color palette gave me the courage to look to my own Black American Puerto Rican roots to channel some of that essence into my work while also candidly telling my own story in the time that I live.”
Free | More Info
Colloquia Series | The Madonna del Baraccano: Restoring a Miraculous Image in Renaissance Bologna
November 29, 4:00 PM | Art Building, Room 312
Gloria de Liberali, a PhD candidate in Art History, will talk about the miraculous image of the Madonna del Baraccano, a thirteenth-century fresco depicting the Virgin and Child Christ painted inside one of the bastions of the south wall that used to protect the city of Bologna, and the restored image that we know today by Francesco del Cossa in 1472, and will re-examine the material transformations and will ask what it meant for an artist to intervene on a miracle working image, and how – if at all – its authority and efficacy were affected by physical alterations and stylistic updating.
Free | More Info
Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival
November 29 to December 2 | Henry Art Gallery
On the occasion of the exhibition Between Bodies, the Henry and the Northwest Film Forum have partnered to present this film.
For almost fifty years, Donna Haraway — scholar, professor, writer — has been merrily challenging the colonialist and patriarchal underpinnings of orthodox assumptions in gender, science, and trans-species thought. Taking inspiration from feminism, science fiction, environmentalism, and Marxism, in works such as “A Cyborg Manifesto” and Primate Visions, she proposes nothing less than new ways of understanding the world and creating the future.
Director Fabrizio Terranova has fashioned an ideal presentation of Haraway’s history and philosophy. He films her in long takes and spacious frames, granting the audience a full, unfettered perspective on her freewheeling, gesticulating pedagogy. And yet Terranova is too crafty a filmmaker to have made a standard documentary. Throughout, deliberately low-tech green screen and computer graphics effects festoon the screen, subtly manifesting as well as buttressing Haraway’s ideas. His mischievous intelligence is a counterpart to hers, and the result is a film as playfully provocative as Haraway herself.
$9 tickets for UW students | More Info
(Im)migration: Music of Displaced Peoples
December 2, 4:00 pm | Brechemin Auditorium
Free |More Info
Gospel Choir
December 3, 7:30 PM | Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater
Phyllis Byrdwell leads the 100-voice gospel choir in songs of praise, jubilation, and other expressions of the Gospel tradition. Byrdwell is Director of the UW Gospel Choir, Minister of Music at Mount Zion Baptist Church of Seattle, and a music educator for Lakeside School. She was inducted into the Washington Music Educators Association’s Hall of Fame in 2002 and serves on the Seattle Symphony Board of Directors.
CarolFest
December 5, 7:30 pm | Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater
