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Exhibitions and Performances

2/24/23

by Brenda C. Siler

With a 61-year career, multiple prestigious awards, and more than 633,000 Twitter followers, Dionne Warwick is universally loved. An audience of more than 600 students and fans flocked to the University of Maryland (UMD) College Park to hear Warwick, 82, serve as the inaugural speaker at the Arts and Humanities Dean’s Lecture Series – and she did not disappoint. In a captivating conversation hosted by Stephanie Shonekan, Ph.D., UMD’s dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, the legendary singer shared lessons, dished on her life and career, and updated audiences on exciting new projects.

Before the chat between Shonekan and Warwick, a small student ensemble performed three hits from the singer’s repertoire. Led by Tim Powell, interim head of jazz studies, the audience was treated to renditions of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Walk on By,” and “I Say a Little Prayer.” Vocalists Ronya Lee Anderson and Lynique Webster showcased their strong pipes as Warwick and Shonekan applauded enthusiastically from their box seats. 

Then Shonekan introduced the icon to an eagerly awaiting audience.

“I remember hearing that warm gorgeous voice and gazing at her on the cover of the ‘Heartbreaker’ album,” said Shonekan, born in Trinidad and raised in Nigeria. “I don’t think I can put into words what the full Dionne Warwick package meant to my younger self.” 

Hits with Bacharach and David

During a question-and-answer period, several students said that Warwick’s music filled the air growing up. Without a doubt, songs composed and produced for Warwick by Burt Bacharach and Hal David have stood the test of time, with a music catalog that continues to be the soundtrack of many people’s lives.

Warwick discussed why the Bachrach/David/Warwick collaboration worked.

“I think more than anything, we appreciated what each of us was bringing to the table,” she said.

As the icon reflected on hits like “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Alfie,” “Message to Michael,” “Reach Out for Me,” “Don’t Make Me Over,” and so many more, there was applause or sounds of agreement like “Hmmmm” and nodding from the engaged audience. 

The Breakup

Warwick also answered my question about why Bacharach and David broke up, a separation that lasted for 10 years. For Warwick, that meant she no longer had the producing team that garnered so many classic hits.

“They did a movie called ‘Lost Horizon’ that didn’t do well,” said Warwick about the award-winning music duo. “That was it,” she continued, giving a thumbs-down signal for the movie soundtrack.

In came mega record producer Clive Davis who connected Warwick with Barry Gibb, the singer, composer and producer from the best-selling group the Bee Gees. He wrote and produced Warwick’s biggest seller, “Heartbreaker.” She did not want to record the song, but Gibb wore her down.

Bacharach and David did reconcile and worked together on several projects. David died in 2012. Bacharach died recently on February 8. Warwick worked with Bacharach on the HIV-AIDS support anthem “That’s What Friends Are For.”

New Music

Warwick and another music icon Dolly Parton recently announced a collaboration on a gospel song. Their song, “Peace Like a River,” will be released on Feb. 23.

When Warwick responded to a question about singers she likes, she admitted that Earth, Wind & Fire was a group she loved and could listen to at any time. Warwick then gave a jaw-dropping announcement: she is working on a project with Earth, Wind & Fire. 

The evening finished with the UMD musicians singing “That’s What Friends Are For.”

Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over,” a documentary about the singer’s life and career, is now on HBO Max.

Join us for a conversation featuring artist Cy Keener, landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor, and scientist John Woods, who collaborated over a four year period to create the work in our current exhibition Arctic Ice: A Visual Archive (on view through February 15, 2023). Their work is the result of the integration of field data, remote satellite imagery, scientific analysis, and multimedia visual representation and documents Arctic ice that is disappearing due to climate change. What is unique about this art based on scientific data is that Keener and Holzman were involved in the design and construction of the tools that collected the data as well as their placement in the environment. With this work, their goal is to make scientific data tangible, visceral, and experiential. They ask how artistic and creative practices can contribute to scientific endeavors while making scientific research visible to the public.

Agenda:

6:00 – 6:30 p.m. Doors open, audience takes seats in NAS Building Fred Kavli Auditorium

6:30 – 6:50 p.m. Event begins with welcoming remarks and community share, Fred Kavli Auditorium

Anyone in the audience working at the intersection of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please speak at one of the aisle mics in the room and present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

6:50 – 7:40 p.m. Panelists presentations (12 minutes each)

Cy Keener, artist and assistant professor of sculpture and emerging technology, University of Maryland, College Park

Justine Holzman, landscape researcher and historian of science PhD student, Princeton University, New Jersey

Ignatius Rigor, climatologist at the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, and an affiliate assistant professor, School of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle

John Woods, retired US Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Officer, current Deputy Director for US Navy International Engagements, Washington, D.C.

7:40 – 8:20 p.m. Discussion

8:20 – 9:00 p.m. Reception in the Great Hall and Upstairs Gallery

About DASER

This program is co-sponsored by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS), Issues in Science and Technology Magazine, and Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. DASER fosters community and discussion around the intersection of art and science. The thoughts and opinions expressed in the DASER events are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the National Academy of Sciences or of Leonardo.

COVID-19 Policy and Operating Status

This is an in-person event with the option to watch the webcast. A government-issued photo ID (such as a driver’s license or passport) and proof of up-to-date vaccination against COVID-19 per CDC guidelines are required. Masks are optional. For more details about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s operating status and COVID-19 vaccination policy, visit this webpage.

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1/19/23

The interdisciplinary Out-FRONT! fills a gap in the dance calendar, showing incandescent works like Jasmine Hearn’s “Salt and Spirit.”

By Siobhan Burke

For obsessive dance-goers, it’s been a while since January in New York felt like January in New York. Remember American Realness at Abrons Arts Center? Coil at P.S. 122? Even before the days of Covid-19, those bustling experimental festivals of the 2010s — which coincided with the annual Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference, when lots of curators are in town — had quietly faded away, along with the flood of adventurous work they brought to theaters each winter.

Picking up the torch with an even more anti-establishment spirit is a new interdisciplinary festival, Out-FRONT! Organized by members of the grass-roots arts collective Pioneers Go East, which spotlights the work of queer and feminist artists, the inaugural edition opened last week at the L.G.B.T. Community Center in Greenwich Village.

That location was itself a smart choice on the part of the curators — Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Hilary Brown-Istrefi and Philip Treviño — positioning art in a context of community-building and care. At the performances I attended, the atmosphere often felt more like a lively and laid-back gathering of friends and family than the kind of networking event so common on the January festival circuit.

The line between performing for an audience and just hanging out was most porous, and gorgeously so, in Jasmine Hearn’s grounding and incandescent “Salt and Spirit,” on Wednesday. “We build this moment together,” Hearn (who uses they/them pronouns) has said of their highly collaborative practice, which encompasses dance, poetry, song and the lyricism of fabric. (This work features garments designed by Athena Kokoronis and Malcolm-x Betts.) As Hearn remarked when it was over, what had just happened would never happen quite this way again.

Of course, this is true of all live performances. But Hearn’s partially improvised creations have a delicacy and immediacy that somehow make you more aware of, and enchanted by, their fleetingness. “Salt and Spirit” reaffirmed what I’ve often felt about Hearn, that where they go, I want to follow.

As the audience entered the event space, Hearn and fellow performers — Lily Gelfand, Dominica Greene, Kendra Portier, Charmaine Warren and Marya Wethers — were already in motion, playing around with dance ideas and greeting friends as they arrived. Hearn invited us to feel the rise and fall of our breath, to be “with your own time and your own tempo.” As we tuned into ours, the dancers settled into theirs.

The spirals, swells and dips of Hearn’s movement, on their own and in a lush duet with Portier, migrated between patches of shadow and light, vivid even in darkness. Greene and Warren, a few decades apart in age, discovered tender entanglements, Greene picking up and spinning Warren or walking on Warren’s feet, as Hearn intoned “it’s been so long since I found me.”

In waves of song and spoken word, sometimes punctured by a flinch or deliberate flat note, Hearn’s deep and deeply embodied voice mingled with Gelfand’s live cello, or made way for a sample of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “My Journey to the Sky.” In a recent interview, Hearn described the work’s soundscape, which included contributions from Angie Pittman, Becky Selles and Coline Creuzot, as “the house we get to run around in.” Clothing added to that sense of play: Portier’s black sequin dress over turtleneck and track pants, layered further with a hand-painted T-shirt by Betts; Hearn’s ripped, backward jeans paired at times with the wisp of an iridescent cape.

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Click below to read the full article.

 

Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener Collaborates on a New Exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences

Date of Publication: 
2022-11-28
11/28/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Images of massive chunks of ice collapsing from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean have become emblematic of a changing climate and the need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions.

University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener is working to characterize some of these icebergs—capturing their unique identities and the ways they change as they drift in the sea.

His collaborative “Iceberg Portraiture” series is part of an exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., which Keener created with landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor and scientist John Woods. It’s the result of almost four years of trips to the Arctic in which they placed trackers onto the ice to collect data with the hopes of making that information tangible and visceral.

Cy Keener art exhibition

At NAS, the 7-foot-tall digital ink-and-pastel portraits provide a glimpse into the life of four icebergs with vastly different scales and shapes—some the size of a car and others a third of a mile wide—observed and recorded in August 2021 in western Greenland.

“Each of these [icebergs] is a piece of 10,000- to 40,000-year-old ice coming off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean,” Keener said. “In this exhibition we understand them as living things, falling apart in front of your eyes, constantly changing. We show their diversity and beauty.”

Keener’s efforts began with the development of a low-cost, open-source buoy to collect meteorological and oceanographic data to use in his work. He first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington and the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean.

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he and Holzman created “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice based on the buoy data.

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real-time.

In 2020, Keener received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work. And in Spring 2021, he spent nine days on a Danish navy ship on the west coast of Greenland.

In addition to the iceberg portraits, the NAS exhibition includes a continuation of Keener’s work to represent the thinning of sea ice. The nearly 8-feet-tall “Sea Ice Daily Drawings,” made of aluminum, acrylic, paper and ink, are based on some 27,000 data points that come from sensors buried meters into the ice. They show subtle temperature and color variation throughout a vertical profile of air, sea ice and ocean.

The drawings, while visually appealing, are yet another stark reminder of the inexorable changes occurring in the Arctic, Keener said: Before the 1980s, the surface of the Arctic Ocean was thoroughly covered with this thick, multi-year ice. Now it’s predicted to vanish by the middle of the century.

“As an artist, I get to go out there, be in this environment and stand on this ice before it disappears, and then try to bring life to that through installation, drawing and sculpture,” Keener said. “I’m using data not to get more statistics, but to make these things that are on their way out physically real—to extend the experience through time and tell a longer story.”

 

11/16/22
  • By Lilly Roser
    For the Diamondback

    A University of Maryland professor’s 2007 reporting revealed widespread surveillance of Israeli soldiers and occasional retaliation against soldiers by the Israeli military. The reporting was used for a documentary, The Soldier’s Opinion, which was screened at this university on Nov. 9.

Jewish studies professor Shay Hazkani was a journalist in Israel in 2007. When he investigated the Israel Defense Forces, he realized data would often reference a classified report titled, “The Soldier’s Opinion.” This led Hazkani to a decade-long journey of uncovering, researching and revealing the findings in both a book and more recently, a documentary.

While it was public information that the Israeli military would examine soldiers’ letters to minimize potential leaks of military secrets, Hazkani’s research revealed the military also read and copied these letters to analyze the lives, thoughts and minds of soldiers, hence the military report’s name, “The Soldier’s Opinion.”

“There was a long legal struggle to get a lot of these materials declassified,” Hazkani said.

When Hazkani first viewed the report, he came across copies of letters that told personal stories of war experiences. Every letter an Israeli soldier sent from 1948 to 1998 was copied and categorized by the military, then rerouted to the intended recipient.

Hazkani said the letters in the report revealed themes that were never perceived by the public.

“[Soldiers doubted] some of the underlying nationalist story that was very pervasive in Israel then and is very pervasive, perhaps even more, in Israel today,” Hazkani said. “I was obviously attracted to the dissenting voices.”

In infrequent cases, soldiers’ letters would be unknowingly held against them. If a letter expressed homosexuality or dissenting political views, letters could be flagged and reported to the soldier’s unit.

By the end of the research, it was concluded that this collection was ultimately an invasion of privacy as a mechanism for social control.

Assaf Banitt, a filmmaker and eventual director of The Soldier’s Opinion, read Hazkani’s reporting and contacted him about using it for a documentary.

“That was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity for me to put my research out there for ordinary people to engage with,” Hazkani said.

Banitt was a soldier who wrote personal letters during his time in the military. He was inspired to make a documentary about the secret surveillance because of the hurt and betrayal he felt after the extent of the surveillance was exposed.

“I knew [the letters] were being read and censored but I had no idea that it was not for the security of Israel, but intelligence, resources and analysis,” Banitt said. “So, when I read [Hazkani’s] article … I was furious and I was fascinated and that’s a good mixture to start making a film.”

Hazkani wanted to use the documentary to make his research accessible to more people.

“I was very, very fortunate that [Banitt] fell in love with the source the way I did and was very eager, and very capable, and very, very talented to make these letters … into an engaging work of art.”

Hazkani’s goal for his research to reach a wider audience was realized with the screening of the documentary.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to see academic research in a very accessible medium,” said Eric Zakim, event moderator and Jewish studies professor. “The transformation of research into film is a wonderful collaboration that really extends the research to different sorts of audiences.”

11/8/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Words of longing to distant lovers. Complaints about rotten food and ill health. Admissions of doubt about the motivations for war.

For soldiers fighting on the front lines across the world, letters have long been a way to share personal reflections with those back home.

But for five decades in Israel, it wasn’t just friends and loved ones who pored over soldiers’ most private writings. From 1948 to 1998, the top-secret Postal Censorship Bureau intercepted and copied soldiers’ outgoing personal letters and compiled the findings in biweekly briefings for the country’s military leadership.

That bureau’s work is the subject of a new documentary co-created by University of Maryland Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies Shay Hazkani. The 55-minute film, “The Soldier’s Opinion,” features both the letter writers and the former censors discussing the impact of the bureau’s intrusion—sometimes even face-to-face with each other. Directed by award-winning Israeli film director Assaf Banitt, the film will be screened at UMD tomorrow.

"The Soldier's Opinion" poster

“This unit was a control mechanism, part of a ‘Big Brother’ apparatus,” Hazkani said. “And as you can see when you watch the film, it can be difficult for people to grapple with the fact that this existed.”

In 2007, Hazkani was a TV journalist conducting research in the archives of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) when he noticed a reference to the views of rank-and-file soldiers included in an ongoing report called The Soldier’s Opinion. After learning the archived reports were classified, he embarked on what he describes as a “small crusade” to get access. A year—and extensive litigation—later, he received copies of several hundred letters. It would take six more years to get access to more of the trove, during which time he decided to pursue academia in the United States.

For 15 years, Hazkani has been endlessly fascinated by the tens of thousands of letters in the collection and the stories and voices they capture. The censorship unit, staffed mostly by female soldiers, flagged topics of interest to army commanders, like Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, homosexuality in the ranks and drug use. In the 1950s, more than 100,000 letters went through the IDF each month, all of which were first sent to censorship bases.

“I remember that first moment, how truly exciting it was to read not what a leader was saying in a very tailored speech, but rather, ordinary people with raw emotion,” Hazkani said. “Reading these letters I felt that dissenting voices were kind of kept from us—in the education system, in the history books—and so my larger goal has been to bring those voices forward.”

In 2013, after Hazkani wrote a story for Haaretz newspaper based on letters sent from soldiers during the Yom Kippur War 40 years earlier, Banitt approached him with interest in turning his academic research into a documentary. Throughout the nearly decade-long collaboration that followed, Hazkani and Banitt worked to transform the written letters into a visual story that could appeal to broad audiences. (Hazkani’s 2021 book “Dear Palestine” also used the letters to capture a range of previously untold Israeli and Arab perspectives of the 1948 War.)

In a review, the Israeli news website Walla lauded the film’s interviews and the way the filmmakers “manage to bring forward a few of the unit's veterans...[who] speak in a truthful and candid manner, aware of what they did and with a sense of self-criticism." The film, it said, “does not have a single boring moment.”

In one scene, Sinai Peter, who served in the army between 1971–74, cries as he reads one of his letters from the time contemplating the dehumanizing ways he saw Israeli soldiers treat Arabs they encountered. He admits in the letter that he’d considered fleeing, or worse—ending his own life.

In the next scene, Peter sits across from the former officer who read those words decades earlier, Adi Tal. She tells him how his letter was shared with leadership as an example of waning soldier morale.

“I was very curious to meet you,” he tells her, “since you rummaged through my innards.”

“I could never do a job like that,” he adds, creating an uncomfortable moment.

Tal admits her youth and naivete at the time, and how she now views the work as “invasive.” Ultimately, the two both express exasperation toward the government’s approach.

Hazkani, who came to UMD in 2016 after receiving his Ph.D. at NYU, said “The Soldier’s Opinion,” aside from being artistically compelling, invites new perspectives and nuance into modern Israeli history, including as it relates to ongoing war and conflict. And it underscores the persistent disconnect between the country’s leaders and its people. Except for a few minor examples, none of the letters ever changed policy.

“We learned this was not the purpose,” Hazkani said. “The idea of the bureau wasn’t to make society better or to solve anything. It was there just to make sure the pot doesn’t overflow. It can simmer, simmer, simmer—but it can’t overflow.” 

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"The Soldier's Opinion” will screen tomorrow at 5 p.m. at UMD in H.J. Patterson Hall followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers. It will also be shown at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the JCC in Washington, D.C.

9/8/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

In the darkened atrium of the Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building, a towering screen projects vast, striking and occasionally troubling scenes from the snow-drenched, mountainous archipelago of Svalbard, Norway—one of the planet’s northernmost inhabited areas. Along with the images, a woman recites a poem about climate change featuring phrases from thinkers and public figures as wide-ranging as Karl Marx and Donald Trump.

“The People That Is Missing,” an eight-minute video by Spanish artist Cristina Lucas, is the inaugural exhibition in a new public art space in the heavily trafficked building. Video in The Atrium (ViTA) will showcase video art from the UMD Art Gallery’s own collection and new work from national and international artists.

The exhibition opens tonight as part of NextNOW Fest, the campuswide arts festival that features more than 40 free performances, installations and activities.

“We really want people to be able to stumble upon art without having to physically be in a gallery or travel to a museum,” said Taras Matla, director of the UMD Art Gallery. “We want to bring art directly to the many students and visitors who pass through this space, allowing art to be part of their daily lives.”

ViTA has been in the works for over a year. Matla and other gallery personnel readied a large wall for projections and invested in high-tech equipment for crisp visuals and audio. A control panel in the Art Gallery office allows for staff to manage the projections from behind the scenes. And a number of benches invite passersby to stop, watch and gather around the works.

The project is a collaboration between the Art Gallery and the university’s Arts for All initiative, which brings together the arts, technology and social justice to spark innovation and new ways of thinking.

Patrick Warfield, the director of Arts for All, said the inaugural exhibition is a perfect example of the power of the arts to foster social change. The film “interrogates climate change, commerce, history and identity to remind us how art can elevate the voices of those who are too often silenced,” he said.

“The People That is Missing” alternates between sweeping vistas of Svalbard’s natural beauty and its commercial industries such as international shipping, mines and tourist cruises, ultimately calling on viewers to take action to change the course of environmental destruction. The title is an original quote by the 20th-century Swiss artist Paul Klee who suggested that the task of art—especially avant-garde art—is to create a future audience, or “people,” with a collective purpose.

UMD Art Gallery Curatorial Assistant Melanie Woody Nguyen, a Ph.D. candidate in contemporary art and theory, managed all aspects of the exhibition. The wide-open, public display helps reinforce the work’s meaning, she said.

“When I approached Cristina about showing the work here at a university, especially in such a public space, she was excited about the prospect because young people and students could make up the ‘people that is missing,’” Nguyen said—“the next generation who will take on the task of combating the climate crisis.”

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“The People That Is Missing” runs Sept. 8-Dec. 3 at the new Video in The Atrium space in the Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building.

8/6/22

The Soldier's Opinion premiered in Jerusalem's Film Festival generated much interest. The Soldier's Opinion Film

Photo credit, Tom Weintraub Louk (Shay Hazkani signing film Hebrew Poster above)

Shay Hazkani with Director, Assaf Banitt and Producer, Shahar Ben-Hur.

The Soldier's Opinion, is based on Dr. Shay Hazkani's research and book, Dear Palestine.  Hazkani is credited as a co-creator and script writer.  The film was was directed by Assaf Banitt and was produced for Israel's main cable network, Hot Telecommunication and will air on Israeli TV in November.  Screening is expected in the U.S. as well. 

The Soldier's Opinion

Israel 2022 | 55 minutes | Hebrew | English subtitles

Over the span of fifty years, the Israeli military censorship secretly copied soldiers' personal letters, extracting their views on the most contentious issues facing Israeli society. The findings were presented to leaders in a top-secret report identified as “The Soldier’s Opinion.”

Hazkani and film crew_ The Soldier's Opinion

Shay Hazkani with film Director, Producer, and Sound Designer, Erez Eyni Shavit. Photo credit Ben Tofach

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