PENNY W. STAMPS SPEAKER SERIES

February 16, 2012

Wayne McGregor

Far

Wayne McGregor is an award-winning British choreographer renowned for his physically testing choreography and ground-breaking collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science. He is the Artistic Director of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance in London and Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. McGregor has also been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire).

McGregor is a frequent creator of new work for La Scala, Paris Opera Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theatre, Stuttgart Ballet and New York City Ballet; as well as movement director for theatre, film (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and music videos (Radiohead's Lotus Flower, which has generated over 14 million hits). His upcoming productions include new work for The Royal Ballet and a new Rite Of Spring for Bolshoi Ballet. In July 2012, McGregor will lead up to 2,000 Londoners in Big Dance Trafalgar Square.

Co-sponsored by the University Musical Society. Part of Pure Michigan Renegade and CORD: the Congress on Research in Dance.

Selected Bibliography >

March 8, 2012

Matthew Carter & Roger Black

Type: Design and Changing Technology

Type designer and MacArthur Fellow Matthew Carter is principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc. He is also a Royal Designer for Industry, and a Senior Critic on Yale’s Graphic Design faculty. His type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian (for newspaper text), Bell Centennial (for the US telephone directories), ITC Charter, and faces for Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Devanagari. For Carter & Cone he designed Mantinia, Sophia, Big Caslon, Alisal and Miller. For Microsoft he designed the screen fonts Verdana, Tahoma and Georgia.

For 40 years, working with magazines like Rolling Stone, newspapers like The New York Times and web sites like Bloomberg.com, Roger Black has been developing better ways to communicate content. His teams have redesigned Reader’s Digest, Esquire, Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Black is currently design director of Nomad Editions, a group of digital weeklies, and a partner in the Font Bureau and Danilo Black. In the last year he helped launch four new companies: Webtype, Treesaver, Ready-Media and Nomad Editions.

With support from AIGA: Detroit—the professional association for design.

March 15, 2012

Ernesto Neto

The Edges of the World

A leader in Brazil’s contemporary art scene, sculptor Ernesto Neto expands the practice of sculpture with physical interaction. Over the last decade, he has achieved international acclaim for dramatic, participatory environments involving biomorphic forms. Though his work is characterized by the use of stretchy, transparent fabric, often weighted with spices, he constantly experiments with other materials and techniques. Underpinning all his work is a continual inquiry into a vast range of subjects, including anthropology, subatomic physics, urban planning, sociology, film and literature. In his work, Neto aims to create "an art that unites, helping us to interact with others, showing us the limits, not as barriers but as a place of sensations and of exchange and continuity."

With support from the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids (UICA) and the U-M Museum of Art (UMMA)

March 22, 2012

Sue Coe

Cruel: Animal Bodies

One of the foremost political artists working today, Sue Coe has documented the atrocities committed by people against animals, as well as the atrocities that humans commit against one another through racial, class and gender inequities. She has come to the conclusion that humankind's relationship to the natural environment is the most compelling social issue of our time. A firm believer in the power of the media to effect change, Coe’s work has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Art News, and many other periodicals. Accessible to a broad audience, Sue Coe’s etchings, lithographs and woodcuts are popular and highly collected.

Co-sponsored by ArtsEngine, Living Arts and the U-M Museum of Art (UMMA)

March 29, 2012

Craig Baldwin

Society of Spectacle

Craig Baldwin is an experimental filmmaker who uses “found” footage as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary on subjects that range from intellectual property rights to consumerism. His film, Wild Gunman, is a compilation of images and associations that deconstruct the Malboro Man, an icon of masculinity and consumer addiction. In another early work, Stolen Movie, Baldwin stormed into movie theaters, filmed the images off the screen, and then ran out the back. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America is a parody of CIA interventions in developing countries, presented as a mockumentary. Baldwin believes "there can be joy in the discovery of unexpected meanings in collage and recombinatory forms. There can be pride in the exercise of ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of zero budgets through improvisation and re-use of tools and materials, at hand or in the dumpster, rather than the mindless consumption of the next (expensive) gadget." He is currently a professor at the University of California at Davis.

Co-sponsored by the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF).

April 5, 2012

Shelly Berg

Follow the Sun

All Music Guide calls jazz pianist Shelly Berg “one of the finest pianists around…playing modern jazz.” Shelly's CD, Blackbird (Concord), reached #1 in US jazz radio (Jazzweek) and garnered Record of the Year. He has collaborated with jazz vocalists such as Patti Austin, Nancy Wilson, Bobby McFerrin, Kurt Elling, and Dionne Warwick, and performed/recorded with jazz legends including Ray Brown, Peter Erskine, Jon Faddis, Woody Herman, James Moody, Arturo Sandoval, Clark Terry and Bill Watrous, to name a few.

Shelly's composing and orchestrating for television and film includes Fudge, CBS's A League of Their Own, Dennis Miller Live, Almost Heroes, For Your Consideration, and Men of Honor. He has orchestrated for Chicago, Kiss, Carole King, Richard Marx, Joe Cocker, Elliott Smith, Lou Rawls, Steve Miller, and most recently was a featured orchestrator on Ray Sings, Basie Swings (a Ray Charles/Count Basie Orchestra collaboration) and Arturo Sandoval's A Time for Love. Shelly is currently dean of the Frost School at Miami University.

With Support from the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at the School of Music, Theater, and Dance.